Carole Simmons Oles

Travel, blood, and transgression are the materials that art shapes in these poems. Carole Simmons Oles’s work moves among physical, spiritual, and metaphorical frontiers where East meets West, where relationships are forged and broken, and where a woman can now process and reflect on the experiences that have shaped her life.

In Sympathetic Systems, Carole Simmons Oles explores with great poignancy and precision the landscape of parenthood where it is most difficult to know one's own heart and mind, that is, where independence collides with love and concern. These are beautiful, necessary poems.

From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908). After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and the Brownings. Though some of her work survives today, much of it has disappeared. Oles rediscovers Hosmer's life in ""Waking Stone"". This is a dialogue, an exploration of what Oles calls their ""parallel universes."" In beautiful and affecting lyric and narrative poems, some in Hosmer's voice, some in her own, Oles bends time and circumstances to reveal the essential kinship between two women artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer's story, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief, and triumph, as well as through Oles' life and time, speaking imaginatively to young women about cutting themselves with razor blades, and to older women about suffering disfiguring treatments for breast cancer.

In Carole Simmons Oles's fourth collection of poetry, small events of everyday life throw open a door to meditations on the absence of a husband, on the separation from children, and on the sustenance gained from friendship and the sorrow its loss. Each poem has an ambitious range, sure in its leap from subject to subject. ""In Time, with Holsteins,"" for example, carries us from close observations on the daily life of cows to facts about Indian rites of penance and purification to worry about a friend's diagnosis of breast cancer.Even as the poems take their strength from the personal, they are informed by a global concern, the poet's belief in a network of trust and obligation. ""The Radioactive Ball"" reflects this concern:I caught itand screamed for water.Someone carried a pail,I plunged my hands in.The water boiled.I wore violet gloves beaded with glass.>Now what do I do with this water.How can I pick the pail up.Where should I set it.How to turn doorknobs and enter roomsand not lift my childIs it too late to cut them off.Where will I bury them.If I burn them, whowill breathe the air of their burning.Throw them into the ozone.Ship them to Mars,these death hands.No pockets will have them.In The Deed, Oles's strong female voice is dedicated to the exploration of loss tempered by the particulars of pleasure this world offers. In the generous embrace of its vision, this collection will appeal to a wide readership.