When one thinks of concentration camps, one thinks of death; but Gail Peck’s poems in From Terezin, based on artwork by children in Terezin Concentration Camp, brim with vitality. These poems are voices, the voices of children who, in the midst of suffering, chose to draw flowers and fish, leaves and the moon, each other. They drew their pictures as Gail Peck draws them with the strokes of language: alive, their imaginations thriving.
Rhett Iseman Trull
From Terezin Pudding House Publications /ISBN 1-58998-640-7 $11.50 including S&H To order: Gail Peck 250 King Owen Ct. Charlotte, NC 28211 www.gailpeck.org
At the center of this beautifully crafted book is, indeed, an unquenchable thirst. This is a world of longing, always for something just out of reach, a world filled with the ever-present fear of what might flourish/ among the tree roots/ veiled in beauty and vengeance. Yet at the root of all the longing, the thirst, is a deep and abiding love for the people and things and places of this often difficult world. I don’t know any other poet more skillful than Gail Peck at divining music from everyday speech. Each poem takes up to a place we never expected to go, a place that feels just right once we arrive there.
Cathy Smith Bowers
In, Thirst, Gail Peck lays out the fever chart of a family, four generations of Sad things ghosting their way back. With plain spoken tenderness and anguish, Peck brings us their stories, opening the valve of grief until it flows freely. Thirst is also about the complexities of love. Love and loss: these are the twin poles that magnetize the poems and draw us into them, where we’re held by a voice that is at once affectionate and exasperated and ruefully true.
Elton Glaser
Thirst is available from the author: Gail Peck 250 King Owen Ct. Charlotte, NC 28211 $15 including postage
Thirst is available from: www.MainStreetRag.com/store/ ISBN 1-930907-45-1
Foreshadow is available from the MSR Online Bookstore
ISBN 1-930907-14-1 $6
Reading stacks of manuscripts entered in contests, I have occasionally daydreamed of one whose last page might send me eagerly back to its first for a second reading. This was the one. Drop Zone weaves the textual richness and energetic density of poetry into a far-flung and spellbinding net of narrative. I have come to care deeply about the people of these poems, thanks to the poet’s extraordinary blend of humanity and technical skill.
Henry Taylor, Series Final Judge
Drop Zone may be ordered through Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon.com. It can also be ordered directly from the publisher: Texas Review Press, English Department, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341.
Gail Peck’s poems are distinguished by their clarity and precise attention to detail and to language. Her speaker examines the past—both distant and near—with an unflinching determination to explore the hurts and losses of a life, and to extract understanding. Her discoveries rise out of each poem’s experience with a remarkable lack of inflation, and a convincing sense of hard-earned knowledge. The speaker tells us in the collection’s last poem, "Music": "though I can’t play/ and know nothing of music, except the pressure/ of one thing against another,/ how hollowness makes sound"; out of pressure, out of "hollowness," come authentic poems.
Joan Aleshire
New River is available from the author: Gail Peck 250 King Owen Ct. Charlotte, NC 28211 $6 including postage
