Event

Author/Poet Victoria Redel with VT. Poet Laureate Sydney Lea

An evening of Spoken Word with Author/Poet Victoria Redel with VT. Poet Laureate Sydney Lea.

With a voice rooted in a lush, immediate present, Victoria Redel explores the necessity to live and love deeply in her third collection of poems, Woman Without Umbrella. With a fearless and insistent engagement in language, Redel leads us, unprotected, through landscapes urban and domestic, contemplative and erotic, as she navigates the self and the world, from love to disaster to "a calm easy everyday" and back to love again. "Could we bear to look at one another // and know how full the heart has been," she asks of a new lover, declaring, "If my love burns let the wick be."

Sydney Lea's eighth collection of poems, Young of the Year, takes its title from "the term our old folks use to name / a prior spring's wild things." Casting a candid, contemplative look back at a life lived, and out at a world alive with motion, where "kinglets were suddenly flying / from his south to land all around," Young of the Year offers a vital account of human life against the awesome scale of the kingdoms of animals, memories, and geology alike. These poems stretch out considered, affective sentences that equally call to mind the heady "wail and whisper and funk" of musicians like Clifford Brown and Clyde McPhatter, the New England musings of Robert Frost, and Robert Penn Warren's
narratives and anecdotes.