Requiem: Poems

Requiem can be ordered through Writers & Books, Bookshop Santa Cruz, or Amazon.

Requiem is Roz Spafford’s first book of poems. As the title suggests, the book meditates on the relationship between the living and the dead–not just the dead in our own lives, but the dead to whom we are related because of what we have done and what we have not done. The center of the book, “The Gospel According to Mary,” reconsiders the gospels in the imagined “voice” of Mary, as she resists and revises the Christian narrative. As Carl Dennis explains in his Foreword to the book, these and other poems struggle to reconcile with loss through engagement in the natural world. He writes, “As our bodies are contained within the context of natural process, our minds contain within themselves a process of death and birth, loss and resistance that define for us what it means to be human, to live in time and history.” Requiem won the 2008 Gell Prize from Writers & Books in Rochester, New York. Scroll down for links to some poems from Requiem.

http://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/book/9780981901800