Books
AFTERIMAGE:
Purchase at Amazon.com or at Big Red Books, 120 Main St, Nyack NY.
Kathryn Weld’s Afterimage dwells in elegy and often in the sweetly and sadly elegiac moments when loss is seen, felt, and anticipated but not yet realized-- and in dealing with parental dementia, the poet confronts the loss before the loss. Often set against a lovingly observed Adirondack landscape, these clear-eyed meditations on loss are both heartbreaking and reassuring as they embrace their necessary heartbreak: “What stays? A girl’s finger/tracing her mother’s mouth.”
—Andrew Hudgins, American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2010)
Tuned with awareness keen enough to hear “a sibilance from flexing steel,” the poems in Afterimage move from acute perception to the spaces between thoughts. They pause to notice both presence and absence—from weeds in the garden to the suspended interval that acts as “a comma between thunder clauses.” Written under the sign of winter, familiar with landscapes of ice, dormancy, and loss, these poems offer warmth, recognition, and solace nonetheless. They are poised and intricate, attentive to the ways “[t]he mind makes / decoupage: ballerina, // oilrig, trout. Moonlight / on these canyon walls….” Weld’s crystalline and deftly measured lines move through fields of memory and grief—a youth recalled, a family’s dwellings, a mother’s death—and they find in these recollections not only the vulnerability and fallibility of human experience, but a rich capacity for intimacies with other people, with growing things, with light itself.
—B. K. Fischer, Cieve (BOA Editions, 2021)
Kathryn Weld is a serious and singular poet. Her lush language is matched by the profundity of her observations. Simone Weil said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Although both Weld—a mathematician by profession—and her poems are secular, her fierce and unrelenting attention to both the beauty and brutality of daily life—including caring for an ailing mother—take on an almost religious significance in the care and grace that she bestows upon them. Weld's polished voice has a conviction that is rare to find in a full-length debut collection. This is an intimate and deep collection that deserves to be read and reread. Many treasures abound including formal prowess and the best abecedarium I have ever read. It may sound old-fashioned to call Weld’s voice wise but I use that moniker with the utmost respect. This is a collection of poems that shows us, without being preachy or didactic, how “living on earth is a peculiar blessing.”
—Jennifer Franklin, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023)
Kattywompus Press (2019)
Like apple pucker released / by the cider press. Like wings.” So opens “Vigil,” the first poem of Kathryn Weld’s flickering new collection. These are poems that locate us with great precision, exactly where we live, which is to say, in the constant motion of earthly existence, immersed in the life of the earth, its creatures and tides, and buffeted by our own elation and loss. Here are poems that pause on the cusp of a white-out fog over the inlet; the death of a loved one; the grace note of Spiderwort petals against a garden fern.
NIGHT CROSSING
The fog hurtles like bat wings,
storms the bow, dodges
the red-and-green lights
that signal right-of-way,
until, finally, the cloud-bodies
fall away and the boat breaks
to open water, to wind,
waves and Cassiopeia leaning
over the pines. Now night
spills open and my father
seems quite near. I hear
his voice from years ago,
each crossing, Scan the lake,
Girl. Scan the shore, watch out
for other boats, for shoals.
Beneath the engine’s endless
thrum, I hear words like wish,
awake, here, starry, dead –
each a discrete eye of fire,
a single point-estimate.
Touch water – warm to finger,
too deep to parse or hold.