"I write to sense the sound / of my own breath, to hear / even the silences." That tiny poem concludes Listening Still, and it could stand as the epigraph for the entire collection. Using a dazzling array of verse forms ranging from free verse and concrete poetry to villanelle, sestina and pantoum, Small demonstrates how she was shaped by the tragedies and triumphs of her life. Like Robert Frost, Small is a believer in synecdoche-smaller things touching larger things. Some of the most moving poems in Listening Still deal with the significance of the most quotidian things-a little boy asleep on a bus, a bunch of Shasta daisies... --Miles David Moore, author of The Bears of Paris and Rollercoaster
"Sparrows sing me into day," says Edna Small's sturdy, synaesthetic, often witty and always lovely voice. The many tributes to the winged choir members that populate her mornings soar and serenade.
Throughout, there are glimpses of a gracefully aging, sensuous person facing dusk -and beyond. Longer meditative poems reflect losses - there is earned grief in this collection populated by noisy birds, conversations between lovers, messages from the dead.
But mostly there is delight. One chuckles at the sly turns of simple words. One gasps at the stunning wham of a last inexorable line. And one simply enjoys the wildly fun poems in the final section. Small's poems, whether a complex villanelle or a terse word picture, are a tribute to a sensibility working, with all senses and cylinders, "to hear, even the silences." --Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Professor Emerita, Concordia University; author of Reading Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities.
"A love of shapes, surfaces, and depths" characterizes Edna Small's collection Listening Still. Each of the poems, like the stones in "My Father's Gardens", seem to arrive by serendipity, their idioms and endings both polished and remarkably casual. Small is a miraculist of the everyday, a tilter at rainbows. That said, she spurns the cheap revelation, recognizing the inexorable conflict between desire and satisfaction. In the ragged lines of "Elegy for Jason" ("a silent surge roars within / the comet gone from view") or in the hushed ferocity of "Queens in the Garden", Small reveals the bittersweet amber of her verbal power. -- Karl O'Hanlon, Poet, Co-editor of Eborakon
