Love and the Weather

2023

In this, her 7th book, Susan Gardner offers a lyrical inter-weaving of intimate human attachment and the fragile majesty of nature. In the clearest poetic terms, she alludes to parallels and symbiotic connections between them, with either capable of enhancing or harming the other. With evocative descriptions and imagery, and the poetic recasting of familiar language and phenomena, the author speaks of natural cycles and love in its numerous manifestations.

Susan Gardner’s poetry quietly responds to the world’s impermanence with an eye alert to “each minima of silt” and an ear attuned to the “rumors of friction wearing at stick and stone,” its textures infused with the earth tones and shifting geometries of the American Southwest, her longtime home.  From the understated gravitas of “Locked Gate”—an elegy for the murdered Guatemalan poet Alaíde Foppa—to the affectionate ironies of “Marriage”—love’s long haul wryly imagined as an “aftershock we keep touching”—Love and the Weather beguiles as it whispers.  One of its plainest statements, “I want to stay for a little while longer,” may best describe its project, which is the project of all art: to preserve what would otherwise be lost.

—Steven Cramer, author of Listen

The image rules in the world of Susan Gardner and what a delight it is to hear one note from a child’s flute resting on air, a fret of rain at dawn. She reminds us how even the smallest change in the weather can help us hear more within ourselves and in the world.  In Love and the Weather, everything is a part of everything else:  black tea in a mug, the pencil beside a notebook, the manatee the size of a dining table. The quiet exactness, the focused wonder, the moment deeply heard, seen and felt, all emerge in this exceptional book.

—J.P. White, author of The Tree Becomes a Room

In simple, yet artful ways Susan weaves a rich story. “Eyes open to the shape of the world as it may be” speaks to Susan’s keen observation bringing her travels and experiences to life, seeing what others might miss. Susan’s poetry integrates natural beauty into the human condition, creating a canvas of words, a recipe for authenticity, music to embrace emotions.

—Marvel Harrison, Publishing Director, Mimbres Press, Western New Mexico University

 

Lifted to the Wind

Poems 1974-2015

2018 Lascaux Prize for Poetry finalist, Montaigne Medal 2nd place, and the New Mexico Book Award second place.

Lifted to the Wind is artist and poet Susan Gardner’s sixth book, a rich collection of poems from over four decades illuminated by seven pages of original brush-and-ink work and one photograph. Her mostly short poems, some in Spanish as well as English, probe the complexities and contradictions of human experience—art, love, loneliness, eros, even war—even as they portray the natural world with vividness and precision: “Thin ice cracks in tatters” in “Nebraska Sunrise”; “Thunder rolls its baritone song” in “Rain in Santa Clara.” Yet they don’t stop there—as we see the girl in “August” “listening to the shadows,” and as “Galaxy” concludes, there’s “Still a trace of red sky beyond the grounded world,” these poems take us to another dimension: they lift us to the wind.
– Gordon Ball, author of East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, Dark Music, and ’66 Frames: A Memoir

Gardner, a writer and visual artist based in New Mexico, presents a sonically and linguistically rich set of verses mined from foreign travels, personal interactions, and experiences of the natural world. “Locked Gate” tells the story of a Guatemalan woman who disappeared in 1980. “No body. No grave. Not a strand of hair” remains, yet, “Remembered…she’s alive as you or me.” Other protest poems address the mistreatment of women (“we know the sorrow of / our younger sisters”) and the pervasiveness of violence (“Any time is the time / to go to war”). Elsewhere, verses resemble haiku in their concision and natural focus…. Fresh metaphors and vivid images linger: “Thunder rolls its baritone song nearby” and “white-whiskered crane alone / in morning stillness.” “Cezanne’s Apples” and “Garden Bench” are two of the strongest poems….“Yellow,” a frequent adjective, lends a nostalgic glow to “Montserrat Revisited,” one of several standout travel poems: “last tenacious yellow cleaves to sycamore.” The gentle eroticism of “Desiderata” finds muted resonance in “Bedtime Story”…. Physics and Internet security, respectively, provide the unusual vocabulary for two later poems. Care has clearly been taken over the varied stanza lengths and indentation, while Gardner’s brush-stroke images are germane illustrations. Twenty-five poems are accompanied by Spanish versions—an additional gift for bilingual readers.

Precise language and imagery reinforce the conclusion that noticing leads to enlightenment: “a few things / unremarked / awaken us to this life.” 
Kirkus Reviews

It stopped me in my tracks…. Poems inspired by art, a process called ekphrasis, are legion…. But what happens when poet and painter inhabit the same body? Well, Susan Gardner’s work is what happens. She invites you to see a poem and, I suspect, read a painting. The poems are invitations to set aside your narrative expectations and let the mind rest, take in an image, a detail, participate in a meditative process, a sort of sensory and spiritual inventory. They are painterly snapshots inviting us to view a world largely unmediated, the “I” noticeably absent, giving precedence to the “eye.”
– Gary Geddes, author of What Does A House Want? and winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region) and Gabriela Mistral Prize.

Susan Gardner creates a recursive chain of splendid poems in Lifted to the Wind: Poems 1974-2015. She splashes lasting images across pages, defining aesthetic moments that indeed are “lifted” outside chronologies. This innovative collection is a primer for other writers…. Her painterly perspective celebrates colors, textures, and shapes…. Readers may lose themselves in this and other individual poems—or read the book straight through. In either case, they will return to savor Gardner’s words over and over. This book, embellished with the poet’s own illustrations, is a lasting work of art.
– Denise Low, author of Jackalope and Mélange Block

In Susan Gardner’s expansive new poetry collection, she pays homage to those gone, those still here, and the quiet motions of what’s alive all around us, available through pilgrimages across great distances and also by staying still enough to open our peripheral vision. Some of the poems, translated into Spanish, tell in two languages the nuances of place and the other-than-human species inhabiting wherever we are. From the New York City public library to a Nebraska sunrise to a “body of light” in Barcelona, these poems celebrate the vibrancy and vision of a lifetime. 
– Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate

San Francisco Book Review

 

https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/product/drawing-the-line-a-passionate-life/

 

Sometimes words paint their own pictures. Drawing The Line is the recollections of Susan Gardner, from her early childhood to last love. It covers the indifference of her mother to her married life as a diplomat’s wife to finally living life in Santa Fe. It is a life filled with a need to be herself, and finding just who that self is, from having to subvert herself into the expectations of the era she lived in to the expectations she had for herself. 

 

It is a fascinating look at a woman’s life. Each (section) is a verbal painting of what was happening at that time. Here it is in brush strokes, with each word chosen for particular effect like one would with colors… growing stronger from the greater context of the total experience. 

 

Drawing The Line is a beautiful story of a woman’s struggle to be herself. For those looking for a personal exploration of the last six decades, and a peek into the formation of an artist, this is a fun read.

 

Reviewed By: Jamais Jochim  

 

Susan Gardner’s latest book feels special to the touch. The texture of the cover and the following pages, displaying imagistic poems and supplemental ink paintings and calligraphy, effectively move the reader to contemplate the glory of the natural world. Gardner’s poems draw on her wide-ranging travels and her knowledge of several world cultures and religions. Her collection draws the reader into a timeless, holy conversation—as if prayer is a pattern of observation and response, a way of seeking truth beyond the immediate surface. A careful reading of Lifted to the Wind requires a reflective, contemplative mood. The work functions as ritual. The aesthetic control that Gardner exhibits rewards such careful attention. Her work connects readers to a poetic tradition that endures despite the limits of time and the restraints of language and society.
 – Ken Hada, author of Persimmon Sunday, in Whale Rider Review

Some of the poems I recognized from her other books. Reading them altogether makes her voice even clearer. Her love for nature and keen observation of natural cycles, seasons, places and spaces is strongest in the short haiku-like poems…. She has brought her unique vision of the world, her concerns, passions, and intelligence to the page. – Ann Filemyr, author of Love Enough

Love and the Weather

Love and the Weather

To Inhabit the Felt World

2013

Eric Hoffer Book Award, honorable mention for poetry and finalist for the Da Vinci Eye Prize. “this collection rocks the reader in ways post-modern poetry never will…. these poems make us want to believe in the human project—the words breathe and beat with music and electricity”
— Eric Hoffer Award, Honorable Mention for Poetry
“With… awareness and wisdom, ‘To Inhabit the Felt World’ is a fine addition to contemporary poetry collections, recommended.”
– Midwest Book Review, February 13, 2013

“beautiful in production and text”
— Joan Logghe, Poet Laureate Santa Fe 2010-2012 and author of The Singing Bowl

Susan Gardner’s spare but urgent collection of poems, To Inhabit the Felt World, is “the roar of alive”…. I don’t believe I have ever read lines of such ferocity, honesty and pain….To Inhabit the Felt World is a remarkable collection by a remarkable poet/painter/photographer.
— Elizabeth Raby, poet, author of INK ON SNOW

The sinews of Ms. Gardner’s poetic form elevate our own perceptions, so that we too, may unabashedly inhabit the felt world and restore those moments, which deem us human and aesthetically free.
— Gary Worth Moody, author of HAZARDS OF GRACE

Susan takes us by the throat… into seemingly veiled poems that leave haunting images for us to reinterpret, to meditate upon. These are poems for the poet-breath within us. One reading, one long breath is not enough.… As a fellow poet, I am revived by this gathering of penetrating tenderness.
— James McGrath, author of SPEAKING WITH MAGPIES

painfully honest and joyously expressive. You can almost hear the voice of the poet in the structure of the poems and in the powerful cadence of the words. Susan’s work speaks of honest emotion, introspection, and heart.
— Sharon Vander Meer, Happenstance

Drawing the Line - A Passionate Life

2011

Eric Hoffer Book Award, Honorable Mention for Memoir.

The author recounts her life with an artist’s eye, furnishing telling details about the places and people she encounters. Despite the disappointments in her life, the narrator doesn’t wallow in self-pity. Instead, she ties her experiences to political and historical events with clear, sometimes funny one-liners…. [H]er writing mirrors her drawings—simple lines with surprising nuance and depth. The book’s title evokes her love of calligraphy, her meandering travels, her poetry (the book includes several poems) and society’s expectations for women that she must decide to uphold or not. Her deliberate storytelling style makes for thoughtful… reading.

“much to ponder in this reflective memoir.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“surprising nuance and depth” “much to ponder in this reflective memoir”
– Kirkus Reviews

“most interesting and impressive” 
– Drunken Boat

“a work to savor…. imbued with the same vitality, restraint, and dignity as a perfect line” 
– Blood Lotus

Box of Light ~ Caja de Luz

2008

Susan’s poetry welcomes us into the light of awareness. Using the language at its most effective, she captures the moments, familiar to all us, where light and expression meet. Her accomplished artistic talents allow us an intimate understanding of nature and its impact in our lives… and we blessed by their meaning.
— John Stafford, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The musical vowels of her poetry give us a quiet assurance centered upon domestic spaces and natural settings, each word hovering in its own luminous space, although some poems hint occasionally at unrest, violence, and global conflict…. each poem bleeds moods, tones, and hues in subtle ripples and depths….
— Karen An-Hwei Lee, poet, Santa Ana, California

Stone Music ~ The Art and Poetry of Susan Gardner

2007

Gardner displays a consistent ability to extract contextual meaning from the subtle undertones of her surroundings and associations. With spontaneity and clarity of expression, she explores and illuminates the relationships between individuals, society, and nature. Art critic J.W. Mahoney has said, “Her art speaks of what is not seen yet is present, of what is common yet irredeemably precious.” Gardner’s visual art and poetry bear a striking resemblance to one another in terms of observational honesty and lyrical sensibility. In the words of composer Peter Michaelides, “Every picture evokes a poem . . . every poem an image.”

Intimate Landscapes Chapbook, St John’s College, Santa Fe 1998

1998

Chapbook, St John’s College, Santa Fe 1998

Susan Gardner
sugardner@gmail.com
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