Ponds
Ebook
In Ponds, Jane Clark Scharl explores the mysterious relationship between change and repetition: seemingly contradictory, these two weave together so tightly in human existence that they cannot be separated. Speaking in a variety of voices--from a young mother mourning her own mother to Penelope, wife of Ulysses, Persephone, and Theoderic the Ostrogoth--Ponds is a polyphonous meditation on loss and gain, activity and stillness, and the nature of God, both hidden and revealed.
“This is a fine book. Jane Clark Scharl’s poems, in well-crafted free and formal verse, show us a world covered in light, often gentle but sometimes glaring. In its glow, we see common things (water, leaves, children, mothers) as if they had just been called into being.”
—Burl Horniachek, editor of To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry
“Jane Clark Scharl’s Ponds is a reminder of what poetry can be. Her starting points in the daily world are familiar to everyone—family, friends, nature, and worship. She quickly vaults to the universal world in ways reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but with spare, precise language and rhythms closer to the best work of Thomas Merton. Ponds is a book to reread and savor.”
—A. M. Juster, poetry editor, Plough
“Jane Clark Scharl does something remarkable here. These highly crafted poems often approach the minimalism and tranquility of haiku—yet they’re also like thoroughbreds collected under tight rein, bursting with the vigor of surprising-but-inevitable language. It’s quite a feat.”
—Jane Greer, author of Love Like a Conflagration
“Jane Clark Scharl’s mature and wonderful first book, Ponds, has mastered the art of saying less as a way of saying more. Scharl’s work combines formal restraint with a full-bodied feel for the sensuous pulse of life. In these deeply intelligent, searching poems, Scharl accepts that ‘some things cannot be known’ but knows, too, that to reveal themselves, ‘they bring to mind / the very things they are not.’ Her poems are such revelations.”
—Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City
“Billboards in Times Square converse with medieval illuminated manuscripts. A mother observes her child’s incomprehension of patterns—movements of sun and moon, a father’s departure for and return from work—as she stands outside the ongoing now he inhabits. The archangel Gabriel steps out of the timeless universe to kneel, in a single time and place, before a woman whose finite body will contain the infinite. With a formal restraint that tempers their heartfelt impulses, a historicity that holds the past in tension with the present they probe, Jane Scharl’s poems engage with time and point to eternity.”
—Sally Thomas, co-editor of Christian Poetry in America since 1940: An Anthology
“Jane Clark Scharl has already distinguished herself in the verse drama. Now she makes her debut as a lyric poet with poems that partake of the same energy and curiosity, intertwining the religious, historical, and personal. The poet has a restless love of forms, with one poem sequence extinguishing light after light as it follows the pattern of a traditional Tenebrae service. Dramatic monologues free Scharl from the conventions of confessional, decentering the self in favor of the sublime as her questing faith keeps ‘rising like a star / above the fretted seas of what had been.’ A multitalented writer to watch.”
—Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A: A Memoir
- Title: Ponds
- Author: J. C. Scharl
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798385210664, 9798385210640, 9798385210657
- Resource ID: LLS:9798385210664
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-16T01:45:31Z
Jane Clark Scharl is an American poet, playwright, and critic. Her poetry has appeared in many American and European outlets, including the BBC, The Hopkins Review, The New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Lamp, Measure Review, and others. She is the author of a verse drama, Sonnez Les Matines. She lives in Detroit with her husband and children.