Poetry. Helen Wickes first collection of poems, IN SEARCH OF A LANDSCAPE, is accomplished and audacious, full of both wit and wisdom. A touch of whimsy, ephemeral but sure as clouds, floats through the volume, leading a reader in imaginitive flights fueled by reflection and deflection. Her poems demand close attention, range far and wide, swoop into terrain we don't often regard as closely as this fine poet, who gives us desert landscapes of self and scene to Oakland courtrooms, traversing the lands of loss, change, and love.

IN SEARCH OF LANDSCAPE

Literature & Fiction

Wickes, Helen

Poetry

Sixteen Rivers Press

"As a title, Moon Over Zabriskie immediately invokes the theme of place, of landscape. And perhaps also a kind of mirroring, because Zabriskie is itself a kind of moonscape. This deeply sensitive, beautifully written book locates us in the grandeur of the American landscape, which functions as a kind of mirror, because this is not a book about the outside, but about the inside. Landscape is not a sole subject, or a limitation; we have Caravaggio and Chekhov, and the book's relentless focus is the self: the writer's self, the reader's self. What we have is life: family and flowers, rivers and deserts, paintings and songs. Everyone wants solace for their marrow-deep grief, and here we'll find it." Edward Smallfield, author of Equinox and co-founder of Apogee Press.

Moon Over Zabriskie

Glass Lyre Press

Dowser's Apprentice takes us directly yet deeply into daily life with news of canyon and desert, crop dust, and snow. "Hurry up and break / into life" the poems say. They steady themselves in the sky ("It's a night of fat, bright planets"), look up to the sun and stars ("The Milky Way above us - / that's our shadow river"), and move across the land, from rural California to the "undulant, green Pyrenees," to make a cosmology that we can all share. - Joyce Jenkins, editor of Poetry Flash

Dowser's Apprentice

Poetry. "WORLD AS YOU LEFT IT, Helen Wickes' fourth poetry collection, is an extended elegy for her parents, her childhood, and the farm where she grew up. These poems are both exquisitely down-to earth and open to the realms of myth and memory. With lyric ease, they blend anger, praise, and love for an imperfect, loss-riven world. In the final section, a new kind of knowledge, beyond biography, transforms this book into a memory palace for the poet's mother and father: 'You couldn't tell / themapart, light from place, they inhabited the mind / so deeply, light that sculpted September evenings, / those two people mowing here, raking there, // the glow that warmed their faces as they puttered / around their world.'"—Murray Silverstein

World as You Left It

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wickes, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wickes, Helen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wickes, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

IN SEARCH OF LANDSCAPE

Moon Over Zabriskie

Dowser's Apprentice

World as You Left It