Online with ZOOM: Ellen Bass, Indigo

THE POWER OF POETRY

Online with ZOOM, Bookshop Santa Cruz presents a poetry event with Ellen Bass. In Indigo Ellen Bass deepens her mastery of the praise poem, exploring the duality of loss and exquisite tenderness that lives at the heart of almost everything. Bass plumbs the miraculous from the stuff of life—the grit of oysters, taking an old dog out to pee in the night, shopping at Ross. In a series of aching love poems, the mandanity of marriage gives way to vivid sensuality, even as–under the weight of age and illness—Eros bends its neck to grieve what will be lost. A lifelong advocate for those who might otherwise go without a witness, Bass shows her compassion in these pages. She offers the ragged, beautiful world her steady attention, her devastating precision. Graceful in their melding of the narrative and the lyric, gorgeous in their complexity, these are poems to be savored. To RSVP for Ellen’s Reading, click here.

This event with Ellen Bass is part two of The Power of Poetry. To view the event description for Patrice Veccione and her book, visit the page here.

“‘You may have to break/ your heart,’ writes Ellen Bass, ‘but it isn’t nothing / to know even one moment alive.’ That complex tenant of faith underlies every poem in this superb book, an inquiry into what it is to be present in the physical world, in time, a body in the world of bodies. Bass’s poems are surprising, tender, hungry, and wide-awake, fearless in their attention to every nuance of feeling. I love this book wholeheartedly.” —Mark Doty

“Indigo plants in any reader the need to turn the page, to know more even if it means more heartbreak. You hold in your hands the work of a sorceress at the height of her powers.” —Jericho Brown

“These poems play like snippets of cinema from every woman’s life story. Indigo is our soundtrack, finally, with its addictive and merciless music. This book is merely brilliant.” —Patricia Smith