Goedicke’s twelfth collection of poetry explores the complexities of a relationship between two people—in love their entire adult lives—facing the eventuality of their love and their lives coming to an end. Tender at moments, nearly violent at others, the diminution of this relationship is mirrored in the process of the earth itself beginning to end.
ISBN: 9781556591341
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“Spare, tender, complex, this moving collection of poems tells the story of two people in love throughout their adult lives, and the changes and challenges the passage of time visits upon them. As Goedicke explores the vagaries of human relationships and the natural world, she treads rich emotional landscape.” —Chicago Tribune
“Goedicke uses complex forms with surety and verve, drawing in readers with her elegance, then ambushing them with the storminess of her emotions.” —Booklist, starred review
“The sober yet visionary world she discovers amidst loss is one of the hardest for any poet to encounter. Goedicke pulls it off with simple and startling language that does not seek sympathy, but infinite understanding.” —Bloomsbury Review
“Goedicke… pours out her passionate musings on being and nothingness, and on the love that makes a horror of mortality, in lyrical lines that often drift back and forth across the page like leaves on a breeze.” —Hudson Review
“[Goedicke’s] genius, in this book, becomes her language for linking individual sorrow to the sorrows of the environment…” —American Poetry Review
“Intellectual delight… is alive in even the darkest tragedies, if the poet has the imagination, the energy, the language to transport us. A poet with this power is Patricia Goedicke in As Earth Begins to End.” —Beloit Poetry Journal
“[Goedicke] has produced what must have been by far her most difficult book to write, and it is her best. These poems will move any reader who cares to read them.” —Houston Chronicle Review
“These poems… present us with a distinctive music and a sensibility deftly captured… They add up to an eloquent, harmonious book with a mesmerizing vision and a cumulative power.” —Hudson Review
“Poetry for Goedicke is the ultimate form of communication, a realm where image and rhythm and all the senses mingle.” —Montana Life
“This is strong, spiny stuff.” —Booklist
“Like William Carlos Williams, Goedicke’s work possesses a very human quality.” —Peoria Times-Observer
“Prolific yet profound in her observations of nature, time and human relations, Patricia Goedicke is both practical and visionary in [As Earth Begins to End].” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“[As Earth Begins to End] turns grief to music… A poet of keen moral intelligence and deep sensitivity to the natural world… [Goedicke is] a seer who pulls no punches when confronting the wonder and misery of being alive.” —Wichita Eagle