In
Joyful Annotations to the World Outside,
everywhere is atmosphere and signs, each poem a field deep and human. Daughter, partner, mother, Carol Sadtler is a grateful, compassionate poet who knows you can't hold anything for long. Still, her poetry opens out, always more space for more life, "fresh images in new frames - some garden always growing."
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Chris Solís Green
, author and Distinguished Writer in Residence at DePaul University
In today's mood of swagger and slash, Carol Sadtler's clear-eyed reports from the field present a life of deep attention to her cherished clan and the living world. With an unfussy style, she achieves an almost stoic ecstasy as the narrator thrills to the flash of a red wing, the green scent of crushed herbs, the candlelight gleam on the Black Christ. Water figures not only as a healing force for sick loved ones and withering nature, but also as a rhythmic power far older and stronger than human life. The book's quiet focus on walking, swimming, and close observation lifts the reader above our fractured times into the mystery of a realm beyond knowing.
Patrice Boyer Claeys
, author,
Lovely Daughter of the Shattering
and
The Machinery of Grace
Carol Sadtler offers a book of wise and quiet beauty. The book straddles the fine line between lament and celebration, between fear and joy, a paradox theologians often call "ripeness." Her anchor is nature herself - doves and crows, mollusks and dogs, hickories and Black-eyed Susans - as the narrator embraces and transcends the broken and the contradictory. From the poem in which a 10-year-old girl feels her power for the first time as she pedals through summer fields, to the observations of a sister in her younger sister's final days, this poet is after truth and meaning, which "we may or may not be / able to bear to know."
Ralph Hamilton
, Board Chair and former Editor of
RHINO
Poetry