Poetry. When a poem enlarges my world, I am happy. When a book is filled with one such poem after another, all singing on the page, I am joyful. In IRIDESCENT GUEST celebrating the spirit of art is personal, as when the poet reads Edward Lear while caring for her children, or remembers a hometown musician making her way to Sunday service, 'I grow as old as Old / Grace Greene / who learned by feel / each gravel curve...' I am grateful for this book and will hold it close for consolation, as I navigate the future.--Donna Hilbert
IRIDESCENT GUEST--stunning, glinting. Striding out of the ordinary, these poems shimmer morose and joyful, ominous and light-hearted. Sarah White surveys our perilous, our exquisite world with a solvent 'personhood' sans ego and pretense. The IRIDESCENT GUEST brings great self-knowledge to bear in her bouquet...presents no small effort of stretching and reaching to the limits in order to wreathe masterfully, both the consolation and the forlornness of our mortal coil. This guest pays homage to the art gods, the kitchen gods, and to the children--silver, mutable, delicate...solvent and sure.--Karen Garthe
Sarah White dedicates IRIDESCENT GUEST with affection and gratitude to the Muses and Makers around her and goes on to celebrate many of them by name in her poems. It's soon obvious to the reader that White has lived a rich and long life, shaped by art, music, literature, and philosophy. Many older poets write gloomily of their approaching deadline. Not White (although she does claim to hate the young blonde in the locker room 'that smells of envy and chlorine'). In her final section, Beautiful Adieux, White warmly remembers loved ones lost but tells her kids, 'I mean to 'End, ' / not to 'Pass.'' She'd like her ashes to evaporate, to fall as rain...'over the tombs of Dickinson and Beckett, / Rimbaud, Rembrandt, Manet, and Cassatt'--a final tribute to those who shaped her way of embracing the world with words. Certainly life shapes art, but for many people it's the other way around. When Sarah White says 'There is a wood / where the past is foretold, the future remembered, ' we get a delicious shiver, realizing that here is a book that makes us feel that way, too.--Alarie Tennille
