This week I attended a reading by Taije Silverman. Silverman read from her new book Houses Are Fields. (Published by LSU in 2009)

Amazing, soulful. Words hung on a loosely reorganized scaffold of iambic pentameter. A powerful reader whose quiet strength shines through metaphors, and leaves sensual images drawn from a mix of Greek tragedy and the sumptuous landscape of Virginia.

Looks like Santa Cruz has a very active current of poetry running through it, with its own Poet Laureate (Gary Young), amazing residents like Adrienne Rich (more on Rich and her upcoming book later) and an organization dedicated entirely to fostering poetry, Poetry Santa Cruz.

That trace of light

against the hills will spread through trees, undo

the ends of evergreen, then fall to fields. It will not hold.

As if it means to urge us, look. Love’s body must

be manifold. Black cricket shell, new summer air,

late light. The landscape’s all ablaze

with gentle strangers. Look. We’re standing in a field.

—Taije Silverman, from On Joy, Houses Are Fields

Ms. Silverman is recipient of the 2005–2007 Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she now lives and teaches in Philadelphia.  Her individual poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Five Points, and The Massachusetts Review. She will soon be teaching at the University of Bologna.