Clay Mother,
drop down through me darkly, lash my winds to
your breast, swaddle my singed urge for
endlessness, Blind Mother who stumbles over my ransomed pulse.
Rachel, I stagger through trembling grades of your silence,
weave torn time with your spent breath;
stay etched, child, on my yellow-edge days.
Sky Daughter, you are stranded in my sleep,
your hundredth year, my mirrored touch.
Flickering Mother
my wild offense, my dying.
Cindy Savett’s The Breath is a riveting meditation on grief and resilience. Savett’s vivid, resonant poems create a language for renewal out of the urgent “phantom tongue†of loss. The Breath casts an honest, empathetic eye on the grief process, leading us, achingly, “into the stable of vanished gods†and encouraging us to “pace / within the flame†of absence–to reimagine loss as a transformative practice that can redeem the “hush / left behind.â€
Tony Trigilio, author of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1
The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.
Robert Dunsdon, Lit Pub
