Bring me her heart

Plot

“*STAR*Getty, "Sarah. Bring Me Her Heart. May 2006. 108p. Higganum Hill Books, paper, $12.95 (0-9741158-8-6). Too many writers have been trapped by the advice that one should write about what one knows into writing about themselves. That they should instead interpret the old saw to mean that they ought to learn more is the lesson Getty's poetry resoundingly inculcates. Because she knows literary biography, she can write absorbing and thought-provoking dramatic monologues in the personas of the elderly Alice Liddell, who was Lewis Carroll's Alice when a child, and of Henry David Thoreau as the bothersome neighbor of Hawthorne and Emerson. Because she knows classic folk and fairy tales, she can sharply re-imagine Snow White in the title poem and the Frog Prince in "Conservation Frogs." Because she knows Greek religion, she can powerfully bring it to bear on her mother's decline and death and her own accommodation to it in the suite of poems comprising the third section of this book, "Eleusis." Because she knows her own mind, she can put in perspective even her dedication to poetry (see "The Earth Is Saying"). Because she has learned her craft, she makes meter, rhyme, and formal stanzas the vehicles of winning, natural expression. ** – Ray Olson”