These are the poems of a sensualist; they make love to life, inviting you in: “confuse my hair/with your breathing.” Beauty permeates their spirit. When, midway in the book, we arrive at the source of such life, we’re in the middle of a family and a childhood that will lead the poet toward what is of it and beyond it, other countries, new loves, new beauty. And loss. Elegies arrive to shape the end of this heartfelt collection: they also open to include us: “Every person is a tree about whose trunk/the naked dancers dance for everyone.” And that tree will bloom to a gorgeous final poem in prose and haiku and tanka, a remarkable song of a marriage in late life. What a gift!..this abundance of tenderness!
Myra Shapiro
Janet Brof is a poet and a learning specialist. She was co-editor of Doors and Mirrors: Fiction and Poetry from Spanish America (1920-1970) Viking, 1973. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines. She has published a poetry chapbook, Through a Half-Open Door. From 1976 to 1982, she lived and taught in Mexico City when Mexico was the chief refuge for exiles from Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, countries where dictators were a particular threat to the lives of citizens, especially of writers and intellectuals. Brof is a graduate of Brown University and Bank Street College of Education. She was born in Brooklyn, New York.
