About this item
Highlights
- To read Unfinished Spaces is to catch glimpses of a woman's life, seen through memories that are not always "stubborn puzzle pieces" refusing to fit together, but often full recollections of "mist painting hills on the river's far bank" or "the white birch scraping its branches across the wood.
- Author(s): Susan Hunter
- 34 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
Unfinished Spaces includes poems about the rooms and houses left behind during a lifetime, about lovers, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles lost and the spaces they still inhabit that are always unfinished spaces.
Book Synopsis
To read Unfinished Spaces is to catch glimpses of a woman's life, seen through memories that are not always "stubborn puzzle pieces" refusing to fit together, but often full recollections of "mist painting hills on the river's far bank" or "the white birch scraping its branches across the wood." The book makes mention of such present-day events as the visit of Comet Neowise or the war in Ukraine, but usually sticks to the universal and the personal. The poems capture the author's interpretation of life's moments, and the reader may be sure to identify with Susan Hunter's depiction of children who grow and leave empty rooms behind . . . of grandchildren making sense of the world . . . of losses that carry their own poignant memories . . . of dreams that carry memory to another realm.
Reading Hunter's book is like viewing the globe of the Earth from a distance and traveling toward the planet, with its landscape coming into sharper and sharper focus. We see a birds-eye view of "the thread of a road tied taut to a knob of land" and hear "the foghorn moaning out into the night ocean." But it's the smaller spaces that are just as meaningful -- A grandparent's bedroom, a room emptied of furniture after a move, a childhood home still filled with memories of a father's pipe smoke. As some doors close in anger and heartbreak, others open to views of a Caribbean sunrise and "a clear view of blue sky down to the harbor." The doors of memory are always open to creativity and imagination and to the phrase that can be pulled through the eye of a needle.
Review Quotes
Susan Hunter's Unfinished Spaces is a collection of poems that compellingly conjure both past and present. Hunter's language is crafted to ruminate and communicate in poems that trust memory, even while knowing it is "fickle." These poems are intimately familiar with "the slow cadence / of the passing years" and record a life lived with compassion while crafting that life creatively through poetic projection and recollection. "I recall the robin's song that is my childhood," Hunter writes, and we readers have the pleasure of hearing that song through words.-Stephan Delbos, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA, author of the poetry collection Small Talk
Unfinished Spaces is an intimate exploration of past and future, memory and premonition. In these poems, endings don't come with the finality of the click of a lock, but instead hang like doors left ajar where the rooms just beyond are "still burning with whatever / keeps my imperfect heart going." Susan Hunter has written a book of poems intent on vision, the kind that, like an owl swiveling its head forward and back, refuses to abandon anything in its sight.-Keetje Kuipers, author of All its Charms and editor of Poetry Northwest