She Stood So at That Age

The poems in this volume of many sections were written after award-winning poet Elizabeth Socolow left her home of twenty years in New Jersey and moved to Detroit and the itinerate life of an adjunct lecturer. The voices of the poems are taken over by a sense of the inner woman being somewhat unrecognizable, with a need to summon unknown skills and attitudes and invent new ways of being in the world. In the pressure of feeling "new," the poet remembers other, often forgotten selves. In the longest poem in this volume, she sees her grandfather as Prometheus, giving her not fire, but the knowledge of the horizon, always moving as she moves, her first relativity, while at the same time she can be a quiet scholar in a library, someone digging for clams or an artist making watercolor images.