Even So, This Song
By Lisa Dart
New Release
ISBN: 9798987135921
ISBN: 9798987135938
About the Book
Lisa Dart’s courageous and beautifully intense lyric collection gives us a candid and unflinching chronicle of her profound grief following the death of her life partner, the poet Peter Abbs; from the domestic minutiae that create the loved texture of a shared life, to the limits of what the psyche can endure. This is a grief that is evoked by everything around her-a pair of shoes, a dropped daffodil bulb, a headboard, falling snow. These are poems that howl, that long for rescue and the turning back of time. Yet in the end that all-pervasive mourning becomes the sign, and the music, of life continuing.
Reviews
I don’t think I’ve ever read such a moving account of loss as Lisa Dart gives us in these poems. This is grief that takes over every part of her and is evoked by everything around her—a pair of shoes, a dropped daffodil bulb, a headboard, falling snow. These are poems that howl and cry, that long for rescue and the turning back of time. Yet in the end that all-pervasive mourning becomes the sign, and the music, of life continuing. Aching, profound and beautiful.
—ANN WROE, The Economist
Intense, honest, full of colour and created with technical mastery, Lisa Dart’s courageous and beautiful collection brings us near – to the arc of grief following the sudden death of her life partner; to the limits of what the psyche can endure; to the domestic minutiae that create the loved texture of a shared life. The poet is self-knowing – with knowledge that is hard won through exploration: poem after poem interrogates, in highly visual and rich language, this ‘winter so cold’, bringing a metaphysical quality to this outstanding poet’s ‘morning mourning’s candour’.
—KAY SYRAD poet and novelist
Her “limb-locked numbness.” Her “hard, unending / midnight dark.” The “suffocating soil / of shock” that buries her. Yes, Lisa Dart’s intense lyric collection is a candid and unflinching chronicle of her profound grief. But, in addition to the formidable force of this sorrow, each of her poems contains—explicit or not—the “sunlit, snow-swan image” of her dead beloved’s face. Each moving poem is buoyed by the even more formidable force of her love. By the time we reach the last page of this finely-crafted work, her breakdown has become her breakout that’s become her breakthrough. This stunning book is a chronicle not only of grief, but a record of grief transcended.
—PAULANN PETERSEN, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
About the Author
Lisa Dart is a poet and prose writer. A finalist for the Grolier Poetry Prize (USA, 2004), The Aesthetica Poetry Competition (UK, 2013), and The Troubadour International Poetry Prize (UK, 2022), she has a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Sussex (UK). Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including Eastern Iowa Review, Tears in The Fence, and The London Magazine. She is the author of The Linguistics of Light (poems, Salt, 2008); Fathom (prose memoir, Free Association Press, 2019); This Thing of Darkness (IPBooks, 2024), a highly experimental illustrated book using multiple texts, which won a British Arts Council Award; and Even So, This Song and The Bird You Are (Shangana Press, 2025).
Events
Oct 8, 2025 (Wednesday) 6pm – 7pm
Broadway Books
Poets Andrea Hollander and Paulann Petersen read from and discuss UK author Lisa Dart’s newly released poetry works Even So, This Song and The Bird You Are.
Andrea Hollander’s sixth full-length poetry collection is And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin, 2023). She is the winner of numerous honors, including two Pushcart Prizes (poetry and literary nonfiction) and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, after more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she created The Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she teaches out of her home.
Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, is the author of seven previous collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Birmingham Review, Catamaran, Tikkun, the Internet’s Poetry Daily, and POETRY IN MOTION, which placed poems on the Tri-met busses and lightrail trains in the Portland area. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds has chosen her poems as the lyrics for four of his choral compositions, including the song that ends the award-winning Latvian film Es Esmu Seit and– most recently–his three-part song cycle Naming the Rain. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In 2006 she received the Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts, and in 2013, Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer Award. As Oregon’s 6th Poet Laureate, she traveled over 27,500 miles within Oregon, visiting all of its 36 counties to give workshops, readings, and presentations at schools, libraries, and community centers.