Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems
“Glickman (is) capable of unpredictable metaphor, and those insights toward which every poet strives: the ones that startle with both truth and originality.”
—Anita Lahey, finalist for the Ottawa Book Award and the Trillium Book Award, in The Malahat Review
Running in Prospect Cemetery includes the best work from Susan Glickman’s four previous volumes, as well as a large selection of superb new poems that continue to demonstrate her versatility, confidence, compassion and humour. Glickman has been a Signal poet since the publication of Complicity in 1983, a collection that prompted The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to hail her as “one of the finest of the new generation of Canadian writers,” a promise she has brilliantly fulfilled in an extraordinary twenty-year career that has always stayed true to the poetry that, as she puts it in the title poem – is ‘wholly accepting of what I am / this small frame of muscle and bone.’
From the reviews
“Susan Glickman is a poet of astonishing versatility and skill. She is able to carry off the long poem and the sequence in a way that few contemporary poets can. Her best poems are infused with an intelligent irony, which makes them instantly likeable, but not at all throwaway or glib. And if the new poems included here are any sort of guide, she still seems to be growing as a poet, at a stage in her career when many would be content to rest on their reputations.”
—Irish poet Kevin Higgins in Books in Canada
“From the first page, I was gripped by Glickman’s clear voice, and her frankness soon earned my trust. Even in her earliest poems, she is adept at capturing mood in her narrative, realist style – the bravery required of living alone, for example, or the trepidatious hope brought on by a day of false spring. But what wins me is Glickman’s ability to tackle big emotions while confronting ambivalences.”
—Sonnet L’Abbé in The Globe and Mail
“Intelligence, compassion and wit permeate Glickman’s writing. She seems to have more of an understanding than most people of what life is all about and the scope of topics – about which Glickman seems quite knowledgeable – is impressive.”
—Pat Johnson and Cynthia Ramsay in The Western Jewish Bulletin
“Glickman (is) capable of unpredictable metaphor, and those insights toward which every poet strives: the ones that startle with both truth and originality. She allows herself the freedom to stumble on unexpected associations and to run with them. She can string together a solid line, can carry a poem to its logical – or, even better, illogical – end. Her toolkit contains wisdom, perspective, humour … She exploits the personal, but judiciously; she is not a navel-gazer. Her subject matter is neither self-indulgent nor small time.”
—Anita Lahey in The Malahat Review
“It was a treat to be able to trace Susan Glickman’s career through its various creative and domestic stages in her Running in Prospect Cemetery: New and Selected Poems. Do all volumes of selected poetry imply a spirit of nostalgia, not just a look back, but a desire to repossess what recedes from us? … I think of Glickman as a kind of prophet of household immediacy, both its redemptive joys and its complicated relationship with a writer’s creative imperatives … I’m not sure why, but Glickman’s voice always makes me think of the person who will keep everyone’s spirits up while the ship is sinking, but who you know probably cries herself to sleep at night.”
—Poet and professor Jeffrey Donaldson in the University of Toronto Quarterly
“Glickman proves over and over again that contemporary poetry need not be dystopian, obscure, ugly or angry. Even better, she has a great sense of humor! Her poems illuminate matters that lie closest to us: giving birth (and the years of consequences thereof); the death of a dear friend/ parent/lover; driving home from (wherever); miracles of the natural world; youth (and what happens afterwards). Within the space of three lines one is apt to experience both a tear and a chuckle. My favorites mostly have to do with families – the perils and joys of the meshpucha.”
—Jim Puskas, 5 stars on Goodreads
