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On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing: Poems
by Jeannie E. Roberts
43 poems ~ 86 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Kelsay Books
ISBN: 978-1-63980-686-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025932210
To Order: Kelsay Books, or Amazon. or Barnes & Noble
Or through the author for signed copies, Jeannie.roberts10@gmail.com
ABOUT THE BOOK
The majority of the offerings in On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing, a full-length poetry collection, are written in free verse; however, ekphrastic inspired pieces and a few prose and formal poems [pantoums, sestinas, and villanelles] round out the volume. The book is divided into three sections: the animal body, the familial body, and the human body. The work explores the body as a container; how corporeal form interacts with its surroundings; absorbs the beauty and sensitivity of the natural world; navigates the joys, wonders, and complexities of family, ancestry, and the human condition. The author takes us on an illuminating journey, one that unfolds with hope, courage, and resilience.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
With Jeannie E. Roberts’s On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing we encounter a poet who is absolutely of the earth. Her work, in the vein of Oliver or Berry, is part of the great tradition that illuminates the natural world in all its lush, technicolor wonder. What this collection does, too, is locate human experience within the same sphere, where our lives seem part of the same system as the woodchuck that’s run off toward his burrow back to the safety of his underground home, our actions equally animalistic. The poems in On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing aggregate overabundance, parsing the sensory majesty that being alive can offer if we just open our eyes and ears. Lucky for us that Roberts records it all in this gorgeous collection.
–Sonia Greenfield, author of All Possible Histories and Letdown
Jeannie E. Roberts’s poetry reflects her exquisite sensitivity, as she finds beauty everywhere, even as the careless and wicked try to extinguish it. The natural world comes alive under her brilliant words, each poem a thicket or garden teeming with feathers and blooms. Roberts contemplates every detail of fin and feather in such a way that she becomes one with the flora and fauna, and invites us to follow her there. In this way, every poem is also a hymn to hope. Roberts also evokes the works of visual artists who see what she sees, which is so fitting, not just because she is also a painter, but because this poet is a true artist.
–Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review; author, The Rope Artist, The Neon Rosary
Just as “one piece at a time, can shape wholeness” so too can this collection. In these pages, the poet Jeannie E. Roberts explores the vital themes of nature and survival, motherhood, ancestry, and the complexity of the bodies we inhabit. This book will take you to monarchs in the cornflowers, a forest lit with fireflies, griddles and skillets, and “a house painted in ocean swell blue.” There is an unfolding, which is transformative. We will come to know the “euphony of respiration” and the “buoyancy of geese.” These poems will bring you to a greater understanding of the life’s hidden music and the “revelry of an airborne leaf.”–Connie Post, author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeannie E. Roberts is a Midwesterner with roots in Minnesota and Wisconsin. She has authored nine books, including On a Clear Night, I Can Hear My Body Sing (Kelsay Books, 2025), The Ethereal Effect – A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022); As If Labyrinth – Pandemic Inspired Poems (Kelsay Books, 2021); The Wingspan of Things (Dancing Girl Press & Studio, 2017); Romp and Ceremony (Finishing Line Press, 2017); Beyond Bulrush (Lit Fest Press, 2015); Nature of it All (Finishing Line Press, 2013); Rhyme the Roost! A Collection of Poems and Paintings for Children (Daffydowndilly Press, an imprint of Kelsay Books, 2019); and Let's Make Faces! (a children's book dedicated to her son, author-published, 2009). Her work appears in North American and international online magazines, print journals, and anthologies. An award-winning artist and poet, she serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs and is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee. She finds joy drawing, taking walks, photographing nature, and spending time with loved ones.
FROM THE BOOK:
How Can We Know a Life Unless We’ve Lived It?
by Jeannie E. Roberts
As if bees in motion
lake water quivers
trembles atop the ceiling
spreads reflective flutters around the room.
Here your musings deepen
enhance the array
where letters launch
dance across the page
flow like the hover of wall ripples
catch a wave.
Like the lake
how can we know a life unless we’ve lived it?
The revelation of essence
expands beneath the sparkle
heightens upon the plunge
awakens amid the voyage
as it sways beside the camouflage of catfish
swirls within a school of bass
dives where the turtle turns
and weeds weave near the barbels of carp
billow in tempo with crustaceans’ antennae
as the sturgeon surveys its benthos–
when its elongated body leaps
appears airborne for unknown reasons
splashes
disseminates circles
reverberates being.
Here the journey diffuses
radiates the dispersal of reflections
a narrative you and only you can know and tell.
*First published in Anti-Heroin Chic.
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