“Laura Rodley is a poet who holds our world in her heart while continually opening to that world. With skilled, graceful yet sometimes matter of fact imagery and anecdote, she offers a gift for emotional depth which shimmers beneath the pliable skin of poetry itself. From childhood’s seaside memories, to the working sea, to one of the very best poems ever about Japan’s recent and tragic tsunami, the reader joins Rodley as she shifts her poems into the demands of adulthood with its stewardship of family, animals, landscape and love itself. Here are poems of ease, observation and homage. And poems like ‘Drying Grass’–one of my favorites–which are harsh and unsolvable. Turn Left at Normal is a book of much joy and unwavering observation, a book which will make you happy to read.”
~ Pamela Stewart, The Red Window, Ghost Farm, and Just Visiting
“Laura Rodley's poetry is stunning. She swallows life whole and digests it into beautiful powerful poems. Poems about family, work, nature, children, lovers. Poems about beauty. Read her work carefully, listen closely, for it contains the very essence of life.”
~ Jean Varda, She Was Attached to Symmetry
“Laura Rodley’s words spin tapestries of insightful moments, musical as they flow like breathing clear, cool air; weaving up vignettes of ‘treasure’–lyrical, beautiful images as with ‘touching the earth’ in ‘Given’–such breadth of subject and depth of feeling. Laura Rodley lovingly gives us full measure.”
~ Joan Hopkins Coughlin, artist, historian, and proprietor of Golden Cod Gallery in Wellfleet MA.
