Fullest
Tide: Poems of Ann Silsbee
Edited by Gray Jacobik
Fullest
Tide gathers the life work of Ann Silsbee, whose delicately-crafted
lyrics celebrated human life and the natural world with sublime musicality
and grace. This volume, carefully edited and introduced by the poet Gray
Jacobik, makes a strong claim for Silsbee’s enduring legacy as a
poet.
Sample Poems by Ann Silsbee
“We live moment-by-moment but that is very hard to get down on paper—conceptual
mind gets in the way. Ann Silsbee is one of the ones who did get it down.
The openness of her poems is quietly breathtaking, as is their line-by-line
concision. She makes you feel how terribly provisional life is; yet how
steady, too. Her poems are composed in the deepest sense—shimmering
with concerted sound and a fullness of feeling that we crave but rarely
find.”—Baron Wormser
“Ann Silsbee left behind the poems she must have known we’d
need, the ones that give us hope and courage, that make us believe again
in our own inherent goodness, and that remind us to love the things of
‘this wounded earth’—its people, its trees and bodies
of water, its clementines, and even its potatoes. The painter’s
eye, the musician’s ear—Silsbee had them both, and add to
those, the poet’s gift for language. Nourishment for the mind, heart,
and all our senses, this collection leaves us feeling enriched and vowing
to live and love more fully.”—Diane Lockward
“When we experience mastery in any art form, whether we are readers,
listeners, or viewers, we expect to witness consummate technical skill:
that is simply the ground, at times more obvious when it is missing than
when it is present. When we are deeply moved, when our thought is illuminated,
our sensibilities enriched, when we are as troubled as we are comforted
by art, then we know technical skill has been exceeded by a quality drawn
from the deepest and loftiest levels of the human spirit. This quality
abounds in the poems of Ann Silsbee. Reflecting an enormous range of tonalities,
strategies, forms, intricate sounds and subject matter, the poems gathered
in Fullest Tide constitute a
privileged form of speaking, one that nudges the reader to bring forth
as much in himself or herself as the poet has brought forth in the writing
of each poem. I call that mastery.”—Gray Jacobik
Ann Silsbee, composer and poet,
received her musical training at Radcliffe, Syracuse and at Cornell, where
she obtained her D.M.A under Karel Husa. She wrote for chamber ensembles,
solo performers, orchestra, chorus and musical theater. Recipient of grants
from the National Endowment for the Arts, Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund
for Music, NYSCA, Massachusetts Council on Arts and Humanities, and Meet-the
Composer, she especially enjoyed fellowships and residencies from Yaddo
and MacDowell. Her works have been performed throughout the United States
and in Canada, Europe, China, Japan and South America. Ann furthered a
long-standing interest in poetry through study with Archie Ammons at Cornell
while working on her D.M.A degree. Her poems have appeared in
Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Nimrod, many
other poetry journals, and a chapbook, Naming the Disappeared. At the
height of her productivity as a poet, Ann died in August of 2003, shortly
after the appearance of her first full-length book of poetry, Orioling
(Red Hen Press), winner of the 2001 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and
only a month after learning that her second book, The
Book of Ga (CustomWords), had been accepted for publication. Married
to the physicist Robert Silsbee, and mother of three grown sons with families,
she lived in Ithaca, New York.
Gray Jacobik is on the graduate
faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program (University of Southern Maine).
She earned her Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Brandeis
University and for many years served as a professor of literature at Eastern
Connecticut State University. A widely-published poet, and a recipient
of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and
an Artist’s Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts,
Jacobik’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1997 and 1999,
The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ontario Review,
The Georgia Review, Connecticut Review and Ploughshares,
among other publications. She is the 1997 winner of The Yeats Prize
given by The Yeats Society of New York, and of The Emily Dickinson Prize
sponsored by Universities West Press. Her book, The Double Task, University
of Massachusetts Press (1998), received The Juniper Prize and was nominated
for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet’s Prize. The Surface of
Last Scattering, published by Texas Review Press (1999) was selected by
X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave
Disguises received the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001 and is
published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (2002). She served as
the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place, Summer 2002. Gray
is a painter as well as a poet, working in oils and pastels and exhibiting
her work at various galleries along the south shore of Connecticut.
ISBN 1933456183, 260 pages, $20.00