About the Book
About the Book
Her poems are moments sealed in bubbles, fragile yet fearsome, floating upwards until they break upon your imagination with a small pop. Author Susan Schaefer invites the reader to pause, reflect and delight as she lifts the Mississippi River like a sheet from its banks or creates a victory crown riding the new morning “each bead of sweat, a self-wrought jewel.”
A Well-Versed Life: by Bob Ingram
“Ride the New Morning” is a tour de force of both the author's poems and her life, which are inextricably interwoven as if every moment of every poem is bursting with that time and place and emotion that begot it.
These are personal and lyric songs, for the most, meant to be read aloud, even alone; they most resonate in the aural stillness of suspended time. Some make the eyes shutter and re-open in a different perceived sphere, guests in the writer's mind. Others are paeans of praise and joy and celebration. Sadness is no stranger, as in life, a shadow play, darkened.
These are American poems rooted in a diasporic old world of pogroms and cossacks, but now renewed in the way of a national poetry that was birthed by unique voices as different and disparate as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Indeed, Susan Schaefer's first published poem – in junior high school – was a Whitman knockoff.
The poems here are arranged in three sections: Seeking Self, Seeing Others, and Material World. In this slim volume and in these three vital poetic motifs, Susan Schaefer has actually encompassed the circle of life.
She does it with poetic aplomb from the long lines of C.K. Williams – “We were the best family we were en route” – to the place-centric lines of William Carlos Williams – “Salt air blown across the Jutland wetland” – and adds a good measure of disciplined free and/or blank verse that is totally her own.
But, finally, here is the heart of “Ride the New Morning,” a quote by Arthur Rimbaud found in the Author’s Preface: “When the infinite servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for herself and by herself, the man, hitherto abominable, having given her her freedom, she too will be a poet! The woman will find some unknown! Will her worlds of ideas be different from ours? She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we shall take them, we shall understand them.”