Shorehaven
| Author: | Teller, Gayl | |
| Year: | 1996 | |
| Pages: | 120 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-2678-7 978-0-7734-2678-8 | |
| Price: | $119.95 + shipping | |
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Illustrated by Joyce Muller
Winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Poetry Prize
Winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Poetry Prize
Reviews
Shorehaven Beach Club was a summer recreational facility, in the Bronx, from the early fifties through the seventies. In these lyric poems, Shorehaven provides a lasting sense of community and extended family. But it reveals a human haven, full of the ordinary struggles for meaningful relationships and activities while the turbulence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights and women's movements passed with members through the Shorehaven gates. These are poems about that special spot we each have, that internalized place of ghostly shadows and enduring sunlight we return to again and again, as the very grit of a loved placed suffuses through the bloodstream for a lifetime, that place where present and past are simultaneous.
". . . a moving books of poetry, extraordinary for its collective power, which deepens with each reading. Although individual poems are fine, with memorable lines and metaphors and notable sensitivity to sound for stress wherever called for, it is the totality that gives the book an impact greater than the impingement of its individual parts. . . . dense with nostalgia, yet remarkable for its continual interweaving of today with yesterday. . . . There's a tenderness hovering over this entire work, owing to the quality of the club ("the savor of place"), to the nature of friends and family, and especially the character of the author. She is rare among poets, warm without stinting, sharing herself with every reader as a loving friend." - Donald D. Wilson, Singular Speech Press
"She writes well and with a semblance of ease, although it is clear that a studied literariness is not the point of her priorities. She has given us a series of sketched reminiscences concerning her family's experiences attending a summertime recreational club in the Bronx, and instantly it becomes as personal to the reader as does a tour through Thornton Wilder's play Our Town." - Dusty Dog Reviews
"So abundant are Teller's gifts of language, imagery, and idea, that if only space allowed, one could cite poem after poem for the varied qualities displayed. She is skilled in free verse, but equally adept at the formal poem . . . . . she has given us a
". . . a moving books of poetry, extraordinary for its collective power, which deepens with each reading. Although individual poems are fine, with memorable lines and metaphors and notable sensitivity to sound for stress wherever called for, it is the totality that gives the book an impact greater than the impingement of its individual parts. . . . dense with nostalgia, yet remarkable for its continual interweaving of today with yesterday. . . . There's a tenderness hovering over this entire work, owing to the quality of the club ("the savor of place"), to the nature of friends and family, and especially the character of the author. She is rare among poets, warm without stinting, sharing herself with every reader as a loving friend." - Donald D. Wilson, Singular Speech Press
"She writes well and with a semblance of ease, although it is clear that a studied literariness is not the point of her priorities. She has given us a series of sketched reminiscences concerning her family's experiences attending a summertime recreational club in the Bronx, and instantly it becomes as personal to the reader as does a tour through Thornton Wilder's play Our Town." - Dusty Dog Reviews
"So abundant are Teller's gifts of language, imagery, and idea, that if only space allowed, one could cite poem after poem for the varied qualities displayed. She is skilled in free verse, but equally adept at the formal poem . . . . . she has given us a