BOOKS

Phyllis Beck Katz has published four poetry collections.

Ghost Orchids, published by Dos Madres Press, 2020, is the fourth poetry collection by Phyllis Beck Katz.

"Ghost Orchids contains some of Katz's most succinct and powerful work. Tracing an arc between fear and acceptance that bridges one of life's most difficult passages, these poems illuminate the path ahead for all of us."          
 -  Jane Roy Brown. Author and facilitator for Straw Dog Writers Guild 's Monthly Program of an Open Mikes event: 'Writers Read at Hilltowns.'

"Phyllis Katz’s poems are crucial to us for their intrinsic beauty, for their attention to eloquent detail, and for their capacity to stir our souls. Writing after the loss of her longtime spouse, she knows how– without self-pity or -glorification–to evoke our sorrow, but both in her person and in her poems, she also epitomizes a noble resilience. As she writes at one point,

            Now she begins to open,
            expand to find a new language
            beyond loneliness and grief.    

Ghost Orchid is more than merely lovely; it is exemplary."
 -  Sydney Lea. Poet Laureate of Vermont, 2011-2015, Author of thirteen collections of poems.

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Finding Ithaca, published by Dos Madres Press, 2018 is the third poetry collection by Phyllis Beck Katz.

​In a review by poet Zara Raab she writes, "Just as Odysseus loses his way on the long journey home, so the poet journeys to her Ithaca through the many years of her husband’s illness and death.

With ferocity of will, and with the wit and power of her song, she overcomes the forces opposing her from within and from without, and leaves the 'frozen circle of grief' well behind.

And the poems, ripe and green, that in her travels she long kept tight in a bag? Loss has 'let them fly' giving us the fine lyrical poems and many magical moments of Finding Ithaca".
​–Zara Raab

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In Migrations, published by Antrim House, 2013, the second poetry collection by Phyllis Beck Katz, the author considers life's emotional and physical migrations. She counters the sometime perils of such migrations with the consolations of the natural world and memories of less unpredictable times. By so doing, she attains the philosophical stance of Hokusai, for whom “beauty and disaster exist in precarious equilibrium.”

The artistry and honesty required to reach that stance are an inspiration, as are the poems in this brilliant collection. Daniel Tobin writes, “Katz’s lyrics exhibit beauty, variety, and the poet’s always nimble care—they are the quickenings of a hard-won and vividly practiced cultivation.” 

Alan Shapiro comments, "Formally varied and luminously clear, these poems console and disquiet in equal measure. They possess what another age would call knowledge of the human heart."

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In All Roads Go Where They Will, published by Antrim House, 2010, the book moves from poems reflecting on the troubles of childhood to poems expressing joy in the natural world and the world of art. The book has a dark underside in which death, peril, and loss are faced head on, but in the end, joy and hope prevail. In the great Romantic tradition of Frost and Kunitz, Katz counters grief and despair with her ability to look beyond dark moments and treasure the gifts that life offers. As she says in the book's final poem addressed to her husband of many years, "to have held each other through times of / pain and darkness / will have been enough."

And all of this occurs in verse that sings purely, gifting us with its elegant simplicity and natural philosophy. At the same time, the work of Phyllis rewards multiple readings with the richness of its undercurrents and mythical patterns.

"Phyllis Katz's poems are spare, unforced, and ring with clarity. though they are perfected they always move beyond their own perfection to something else, something miraculously tender for which only they are the words."
​- Vijay Seshadri


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This book is not available at the Broadside Bookshop as it is out of stock.