The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance: Poems by Sarah Maclay

Publisher: Walton Well Press
Date Available: October 11, 2024

Length: 42 pages

ISBN 978-1-964295-05-3
Format: 6 by 9, paperback
Price: $14.99

Praise for The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance

“Laser-like precision and diaphanous beauty have never been so skillfully married as they are in Sarah Maclay’s tribute to modernist poet H.D., a book in which the tension between an extravagant imagination and an almost minimalist mode of writing is ingeniously investigated. Here, ‘every fleck [is] a piece of fire/made pure by its own burning.’ THE H.D. SEQUENCE—A CONCORDANCE is a compelling, even seductive, collection of highly original work. Sarah Maclay is at the top of her game.”

—Gail Wronsky, author of Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems

“A glance in a shard of broken mirror reflects a woman’s profile, blurred but still visible, as we see the shifting faces of twin seers, Maclay and H.D., each more powerfully incarnated as they touch across time. Theirs is an essential relationship, an urgent reclamation of feminine power embodied within these poems, poems written as if mandated as one remarkable poet channels another like ‘the sound of the sun burned through the moon.’ A rare & breathtaking collection, it reminds us that death is not supreme, that the language of spiritual truth is a web of glimmering transmissions and that the living poet is made of a continuity. She is ‘the entire snowfall, for the entire time,’ in poems that stun with ‘a danger of fire. /Also a danger of light.’”

—Holaday Mason, author of As if Scattered

“Sarah Maclay’s gorgeous ekphrastic THE H.D. SEQUENCE—A CONCORDANCE reinvents the animated spirit sourced from the body, ‘estranged and freed here’ (as Celan once put it in ‘The Meridian’) for us to experience like, as in these poems, ‘the whole truth lying in the grass,’ where silence also creates a space that defies time, her fabric of insight implied by desire. Both painting and witness, not unlike H.D.’s ‘Some lovely perilous thing,’ these poems merge with the conviction to find an ‘entire snowfall’ of healing as a shifting love dissolves the ontological domain.”

—Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous

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About the Author

SARAH MACLAY is the author of five collections of poetry—most recently, Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist—and three previous chapbooks. Published widely, her work has been supported and honored by a Yaddo residency, a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, appearing in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Poetry series, Poetry International, where she served as Book Review Editor for a decade, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing and literature at LMU and USC, and offers periodic workshops at Beyond Baroque. www.sarahmaclay.com