Reviews
Review by: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of HOLY LAND - December 20, 2024
"Sarah Gordon's SIX WHITE HORSES is a poetic reminder that Memory is the mother of the Muses. Her poems offer poignant renderings of the people and particulars that belong to her own personal past and powerfully evoke those that haunt our own minds and hearts. Gordon's poems are vivid in their depiction of a lost time and place, rife with homely images that appeal to the eye and awaken in our consciousness the precious nature of everyday objects we take for granted--'sideboard, coal scuttle, fire screen, low boy'--reminding us of the extravagance of ordinary life. Gordon's poems tread sacred ground, even as they expand upon sanctity's terrain. Her imagined colloquies with celebrated saints, seers, and mystics, including Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and the Pope, confess her own spiritual urgings, along with a wariness of conventional religion and its limitations as a means of access to truth. By turns witty and charming, wry and bittersweet, Gordon's poems bravely convey the late-in-life urgings of a nimble mind and a fierce spirit. Like salt in the full flush of its flavor, these are poems to be savored."
Review by: Alice Friman, author of BLOOD WEATHER - December 20, 2024
"In Sarah Gordon's poem, 'Plato Sounds a Note of Caution,' Plato speaks of the various consequences of the written word, its all-encompassing power. Surely Gordon took him literally, for here in her most recent collection, SIX WHITE HORSES, is the written word writ large. From memories of her mother decked out as a gypsy (the shock of it) to the heart-rending memorial to a friend, to her tribute to famous believers, her close examination of THE BOOK OF KELLS, and the marvelous 'Owls in Daylight' that opens with an eye-opening, honest appraisal of herself--always the power of language. How clear and precise the metaphors and her fierce attention to detail. I never knew that a pope wore scarlet shoes and that Cotton Mather's nose was pocked with blackheads. The things you learn in poetry!"
Review by: David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University - December 20, 2024
"Sarah Gordon writes about 'the lasso of language' in her first poem here, and after that, we're off and running, trying to get that rope around the world's neck, to haul it in and tame it. Fat chance! The task is impossible, but isn’t it fun? Isn’t it a joy to wonder where we'd be now if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten the apple, to hear our friend say I can't get my head around that and imagine what it'd be like if that head became plastic wrap pulled taut over mountain, prairie, highway? The last poem, too, touches on the diehard cowpoke work ethic that animates this whole collection, and it, too, is a beauty. But then so is every poem between."
Review by: Stephen Corey, poet, essayist, and editor emeritus of The Georgia Review - December 20, 2024
"If I were allowed just one word to describe Sarah Gordon's latest poetry collection, SIX WHITE HORSES, I believe I would have to go with smart: She takes ostensibly familiar topics--love, death, religion, history--and cants them at new angles. Gordon summons in her own words the shadows of important well-known voices, among them Emily Dickinson ('A good aim can take / the top of the head / clean off'); Wallace Stevens ('inky tributaries / of deception'); and Jesus and Robert Frost in cahoots ('Over the stove, / burners caked in grease, / a sign, a line, a motto, / a reminder of wholeness, / holiness: Do unto /others, say, or two roads / diverged and all that.'). If you give me another word or three, I'd have to consider musical, dense, beautiful and (in a positive way) mean. Ask me for a favorite title and I’d be torn amongst 'On Memory, That Bitch,' 'The Whens,' and 'An Assortment of Astonishing Impersonations.' Fortunate me, to be so torn."