Barbara Cully's first book The New Intimacy won the National
Poetry Series open competition, a nationwide poetry contest,
for which literally thousands of manuscripts
are submitted for a single chance at publication.
Through this work and her other work,
Shoreline Series, published locally by Kore Press,
Barbara has gained a far flung readership.
We get visitors to the center from the East Coast,
and all over really, who come in and ask us
if we actually know Barbara Cully,
and we are pleased to say, we do.
Barbara's regular presence at the Poetry Center
is really one of its nicest features.
To me, the central aspect of Barbara's work
is a profound understanding of the paradox of loss,
that what reduces us outwardly, augments us inwardly,
that what take-- that what it takes from us,
lives in us-- what is taken from us, lives in us,
so that we continue in totality either way.
"At the very moment when I am dismembered,"
Cully writes in her poem "Solo," "I am not dismembered.
When evening comes, your phantom appears.
We will never meet again face to face."
Understanding this paradox, Cully
can present language that encompasses
the whole of gain and loss, that manages
to affirm in its negatives-- that is encomium in elegy.
She ends the poem "Solo" this way--
"it knows nothing about itself.
Indeed, it is not yet itself, not those nights of love,
not those roads, not one waking touch of you."
In the new work, a collection entitled Desire Reclining,
her mortal apprehension opens into scenes
that embody this delicate and inclusive vision, given
and taken, present and absent, lost and found.
That's the true work of poetry, I think--
holding on to life's wholeness in a way that ordinary language
often won't.
So I'm pleased to you to present a friend, a colleague,
and a Tucson poet of national stature, Barbara Cully.
[APPLAUSE]