Judith Vollmer's sixth collection explores human voices and geographies, stories and mysteries, and natural phenomena inside urban spaces. Her lyrical narratives, character portraits, locational investigations, and choral fragments often emerge from physical objects and from green and/or ruined cityscapes. Vollmer's home city, Pittsburgh, and its sister-locations within Italy and Poland, undergird her attention to orientation and perception at work in her poems' acutely visual studies. Featuring twenty-one new and fifty-seven selected poems from her earlier volumes-The Apollonia Poems, The Water Books, Reactor, The Door Open to the Fire, and Level Green-The Sound Boat reveals Vollmer's devotion to examining place and space to uncover poetry that touches emotions related to wandering physical and emotional realms: some familial and deeply personal, some unknowable. Old city, I've come East for your long day and endless night: down in the street, between the turtle fountain and the iron head the party shouts and sings, sweats and snakes, swells into a throb or momentum of sound. -Excerpt from "The Sound Boat"
Judith Vollmer is the author of five previous collections, including The Apollonia Poems, which also won the Four Lakes Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poetry International, The Women's Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and teaches privately.
Contents New Poems Roadside Tavern Young Jane Jacobs DoppelgAEnger A Visit from Milosz Pittsburgh Maps Young George Harrison The Diagonal Angel Dust Elegy Street Fair Ovarian The Reader The Sound Boat The Immolation Little Body Old Red Dog Ars Poetica To a New Window The Ruined House An Elixir of Mica Vernal Equinox Open, Grove from The Apollonia Poems (2017) Flower Meal Walking to Miami Another Green Little Grandmother Pays an Evening Visit, Rolls Down Her Stockings and Looks Around Very Smart Very Proud Mother Comes Street Grate After Reading Another Book of Dull Poetry I Go Out and Cut the Grass Children of October In an Old Hotel The Vowel Copper, Gold, Olives, Wine Apollonia Is Restored to the Book from The Water Books (2012) New Black Dress Field Near Rzeszow On the Tarmac at Dover Air Force Base To a Lamp Sticks Found in a Ravine My Orange Hole in the Sky Kinzua The Bowl For Aaron Scheon I Take My Mother to See the Rothko Panels, 2007 Entering After Pavese's "Grappa in September" from Reactor (2004) The Coffee Line from Yucca Mountain Sequence Coffee with Narrative In Praise of Camus at the End of His Century Port of Entry Installation She Kept Me Spill Note to the Mist from The Door Open to the Fire (1997) My Sublimation Asleep at the 2001 Club, Early Seventies Poem at an Unmarked Grave The Sound of the Slap Passing the Clinic in a Small Town The Night Trains We Built This City Eating Reagan Star Gazing with My Brothers The Ecology of Baseball Tell Me about the Peacocks and Fountains Night Walks from Level Green (1990) Moving to New York Fabian Father's Magic Trick The Nuclear Accident at SL 1, Idaho Falls, 1961 Looking for Level Green Fourteen Nights Sheila's Flat My Grandmother's Rags Smoking Cigars with Li Po Acknowledgment Notes
"Always at the center of Vollmer's poems is her love and connection to the people she learned from: mothers, fathers, poets, artists, teachers, workers, literary ancestors, freedom fighters, and revolutionaries. You'll find Thurgood Marshall in a poem with Rachel Carson; Rilke with Camus. No poet has captured more vividly that place that Pavese describes: the place that one 'has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.'"--Toi Derricotte "Beautifully cooked and served, full of harmonic oscillations, as transporting and philosophical as it is grounded and sensual. Vollmer is a poet in love with the world, real, imagined, terrestrial and atmospheric, and her poetry works in varied and magical ways. . . . The Sound Boat privileges its reader with poems that span decades, a body of work that startles and enchants with honest longing and love, all laid bare."--Plume "From the deeply moral and radical qualities of her first book to spectacular new poems, Vollmer has created a body of work singular in American poetry. With the sense, intellect, sound, tone, rhythm, and music only the most real and truest poetry provides, The Sound Boat embodies, on every level, the regions of the human soul."--Lawrence Joseph
