Tender, but never over-sentimental, the poems in Memory of Blue explore who we are, who we might be, through the eyes of a new mother—her pregnancy, her first years of motherhood—what gifts she wishes to give her daughter, what she honors and wants to pass on: the astonishments of nature and art, the spiritual presences in the world, her own search and lack of answers. And the poet reaches beyond these to the connections between generations of women, her own mother and grandmother but also mothers through history. I was enchanted by these poems— by their spiritual depth and grace, their wisdom, their hope and praise for life itself.
Patricia Fargnoli
Jacqueline Kolosov has brought the sensual world into every line, and fused the emotional life and the philosophical. I left the collection full of wonder at all I hadn't been seeing clearly until she brought it to me fresh and vivid: the rain, the sky, the grass, the flesh. This is a transformative book.
Laura Kasischke
Such a gift, to find song in what is right in front of us—over and over, Jacqueline Kolosov attends to the moment, so that even a cup of tea conjures prayer, and a kettle’s whistle becomes “a threshold into the unknown.” These poems capture the grace of the everyday. Here, sunflowers spring up from the spilled seeds of birdfeeders, and her “light-filled lines” raise our lives into the realm of the luminous. If Pierre Bonnard or Berthe Morisot had used metaphor and sound to celebrate the “ordinary world,” they might have come up with some equivalent of Memory of Blue.
Theodore Deppe
