Wild Silence

There is a pleasing formality and richness of detail in the poems of Elizabeth McCarthy's Wild Silence. Many of her best poems in this chapbook are memory poems, casting back to girlhood when she and her friends walked "barefoot into summer nights,/under a watchful moon,/[roaming] our small town roads"; or recalling her Irish predecessors who suffered the potato famine "there/in the green fields where Celtic gravestones/now stand crooked, moss and lichen covered"; or offering nostalgic meditations on her own and her parents' generations - "the highwater marks... of our family's epic events." McCarthy also examines the natural world of Vermont, finding lessons and analogies in its flora and fauna - whether tracking the way blue morning glories open to the music of the day or watching how a heron stands "at the edge of water and marsh,/a poised reminder/of patience and time" - that might help humans navigate their own lives on earth. Whatever the subject, McCarthy's poems offer the delights of a sensuous imagistic imagination, accompanied by discursive, meditative appraisals, and a lyrical music that reinforces the emotional engagement with whatever she muses on.

-Neil Shepard. Author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, The Book Failures (Madville Publishing 2024).



Elizabeth R. McCarthy's Wild Silence offers the gift of looking-of sitting in meditative reflection on the natural world, our shared mortality, and the complicated beauty of domestic absence. These poems evoke peace, and, just underneath, a lovely twinge of grief-for the inevitability of time passing and what it leaves behind. In "Heron," the bird spurs a memory of the speaker as a young girl with her friends, "shivering in the shallows, marking our memories"-an image of loss and sweetness. Here and elsewhere, this collection is buoyed by a sense that while we are always engaged in the act of losing something, we are also always rebuilding, re-seeing. There is patience in these poems' precise observations, a willingness to deeply consider what is always all around us. I looked up from reading feeling ready to see what I often overlook.

-Kerrin McCadden. Her most recent book is American Wake (Black Sparrow 2021.)