“Rosaly DeMaios Roffman’s poetry of discovery, courage, devotion and gratitude inspires the reader toward healing and wholeness. The poet is a teacher and a traveler: Yaninna, Jerusalem, Waikiki, Kyoto, Chimayo, the Hebrides and more. Along the way, many have told her their stories and secrets, and she shares these stories (and her own) with an engaging blend of deep reverence, compassionate vision, and quirky humor. Roffman’s long-awaited volume, I Want to Thank My Eyes, is food for the soul, and makes us hungry for more.”
—Joan E. Bauer, Author of The Almost Sound of Drowning
“Rosaly DeMaios Roffman has been writing her fine poems for many years, and it’s a cause for celebration to see so many of them here under one roof in this wonderful house. I Want to Thank My Eyes sings with tenderness and gentle wisdom, propelled by the quiet, intense urgency of a writer familiar with life’s complex physical and emotional landscapes. Imbued with an innate curiosity, a deeply felt empathy, Roffman’s work draws on the extensive resources of a life fully lived and on an extravagant richness of imagery. These poems are ambitious yet humble, intimate yet outward-looking, spiritual yet irreverent, and always, always sure-handed.”
—Jim Daniels, author of Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry
“I actually opened Rosaly Roffman’s manuscript—randomly, mind you—to the poem “What I Learned in Scotland” where she mentions her “friend Jerry Stern [who] says write about people not suitcases,” but I am interested in the poem because it’s about Scotland where I lived once, and Skye, where I was herded by a black and white Border Collie. What Rosaly does in this poem is write about people by writing about suitcases, so to speak, so to speak. A moving poem—and a moving book and a delight to see it all written down. “Two Country Girls at the Matisse Show” is gorgeous. ”
—Gerald Stern, author of Early Collected Poems,
Lucky Life, Lovesick, and Bread Without Sugar
