“Sallie Bingham’s poems forge the light and darkness to shape a body of work that engages and shines. The past and the present, the inner and the outer, are all drawn precisely with small wisdom lines throughout. The poetry leaves us with “the serene best our lives can offer” and “the small whir of your lively heart.” A fine distillation from a life well savored.”
—Joan Logghe, President of New Mexico Literary Arts
“Bingham’s poems give us a look into another lifetime—hers, ours, but, more importantly, the one we all share. We are all one, say the mystics, and these poems prove that through the author’s memory and imagination. There is so much here: apricots, buttons, parrots, coal, Oakland, KY, moss, a reticule, and Rebecca Boone, to name only a few. Bingham weaves them in and out of her world and into ours with heart + mind + soul. If in darkness, Sallie Bingham writes the light.”
—Elizabeth Oakes, author of The Luminescence of All Things Emily
and The Farmgirl Poems (Pearl Prize 2004)
“As the publisher of three of Sallie Bingham’s novels, I was delighted to find her poems read as persuasively as her fiction. Sallie takes on tough subjects with an undeniable wisdom and clear-eyed vision that is a gift to all readers. If in Darkness is tinged both with melancholy and an ever-present generosity of spirit that compels me to come back to these poems again and again.”
—Roland Pease, editor, Zoland Poetry
“I have long enjoyed Sallie Bingham’s poems for their sharp edges and their subtle magic. She is imbued in the American spirit, even as she has been steeped in its feminist wisdom. Her literary forebears are Carl Sandburg and Kay Boyle; her inheritors, let us hope, are everywhere.”
—Frederick Smock, Department of English chairman and
Creative Writing Program director, Bellarmine University
“These clear, honest poems come from a centered voice. Sallie is a clear-sighted witness. The people who walk through these pages—family members, friends, ex-lovers and husbands, artists, and women, especially the women invisible no matter what they do?are in pain. Comfort doesn’t work and is distrusted. Yet If in Darkness is not a grim book. Its grace notes lie in its groundedness, its dry wit, and most especially in those very, very lucky conjunctions of words the poet achieves only after working hard enough to gain transparency of language.”
—Peg Steele, co-editor of Plainsong (1979-1994) and co-author, Singing Into That Fresh Light
“As someone who’s followed Sallie Bingham’s writing from the beginning, I can feel only gratitude for this second collection of her poems—and a thirst for more! It’s not surprising that several complex poems seem to be asking questions of their author, but the answers often come with breathtaking surprises. A number of other poems seem to have read a recent novel of Sallie’s and have learned how to dance. The book as a whole proves it’s possible to grow into mellow fulfillment without losing one’s edge (or edginess). Angles for viewing the past—I’m stunned to realize this—are motives behind much of the book as it treats personal, social and cultural, and literal, eventful history, “with its iron repetitions.” Sallie Bingham can see in the dark.”
—Frank Steele, co-editor of Plainsong (1979-1994) and co-author, Singing Into That Fresh Light
