SELECTED POEMS

In this collection, poems written across many years share the page with bold, new offerings to celebrate a serious poet whose language is lyric and evocative. Sheila Burke commemorates and confronts events we will all recognize, paying special attention to those issues women have struggled with in the tumultuous 20th Century. She extols motherhood and experiments with the new roles of women. She examines mental illness, the disintegration of a marriage and particularly, the indignities of aging. Influenced by Robert Lowell's groundbreaking workshop at Harvard during the late 1950s, she elaborates on the confessional style made famous by participants, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She does not spare herself or her readers in verse that chronicles her sorrows as well as her joys. Her poems can make you laugh or cry but will not be easily forgotten.