within sky by Marcia Arrieta

Marcia Arrieta glimpses the physical landscape through the soul’s wounded eye. The sounds of her words create vocal paintings, while the subdued hues of her restrained palette enhance the unthreaded, unstitched memories and actions in a world that resists the muse and the mask. These are “syllables of survival” that seek to “cultivate the invisible.” As “constellations blossom from a tree’s roots,” we learn to follow the visual music of Arrieta’s poems. Ancient navigation aids, the wind, the stars, keep the poems on their spiritual course. “windswept chaos,” an homage to her mother, is perhaps the most beautiful poem. Arrieta invokes her fleeting spirit, “gently gather the leaves mend the white butterfly / perhaps today all will be coherent (she will remember, she will be content.” There is a great sense of serenity and peace in Marcia Arrieta’s poems, although we can feel, sense, and absorb the rough and disquieting textures of the world she offers.

—Andrea Moorhead

Well, where would we be “without” sky? Marcia Arrieta’s within sky contains a full universe as fresh as the one Lucretius invites readers to gaze into: our own, revealed as if we’d never seen the stars before. The esteemed art critic Robert Hughes, not known for friendliness to the avant-garde, once wrote, “I love the spectacle of skill.” I love Marcia Arrieta’s poems because they’re spectacularly skillful in collocating hosts of images, natural and cultural, in compact spaces, like Emily Dickinson’s and Joseph Cornell’s. Her poems refresh the eye and the mind. Her previous book’s title, perimeter homespun, like this one’s, invokes the contrary notions of limit (within, perimeter) and freedom (sky, homespun). In small compass, the short poems—complemented by twelve of the author’s drawings—in within sky point the reader inward and outward, without bound.

—Dan Campion

This is a book with a rare evocative force, connecting nature, books, small objects, animals, one-time moments in a garden, also meditating on the paradoxical nature of evocation: "the birds remind us to listen", "Montaigne tries to reach me", "the books talk back". The sparity of words on the page, the fact that they are "loosely woven", becomes as meaningful as the words themselves. We need gaps to fill them, and in Marcia Arrieta’s poetry the "interlude vision" is equally "focused" and "unfocused". And it is especially illuminating to feel and see how her all-embracing attention makes her conscious again and again of the writer’s status as not of that of a last observer: "a great horned owl observes the fox", "a hedgehog reads".

—Márton Koppány

Marcia Arrieta is a poet & artist, inspired by nature, travel, her family, and books. Diverse landscapes are important to her as is her small canyon home surrounded by oaks, gardens, and mountains.

She is the author of three poetry collections: perimeter homespun and archipelago counterpoint (BlazeVOX) and triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths), in addition to four chapbooks: vestiges and thimbles, threads (Dancing Girl), experimental: (Potes & Poets), and the curve against the linear (Toadlily). Her most recent book through time waves (Arteidolia) interweaves some of her collages
and poems.

As editor and publisher of Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal, for 30 years, she is grateful for her connection to the literary world and being able to create small books for others to read & contemplate.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-048-4