The Breath by Cindy Savett

The figure of the beloved in these spare, lyrical poems of mourning is a young daughter, a "bird child who choreographed my murmuring lips," whose absence returns the poet to a state of spiritual and linguistic prima materia: a "wasteland of irony," clay breath, and orphaned wolves. And yet from these elegiac archipelagos comes incantations so tender and haunting that they reanimate the very subject of lyric address ("O you, my pilgrim, my vein"), and transform the speaker, as she becomes both her child and a postlapsarian creator, awaiting from within a "stable of vanished gods" the "rise to mercy's debris.”

—Virginia Konchan, author of The End of Spectacle

Shattered is the word that defines this book. At its center is the death of a child, and that shattering extends beyond the child to the mother, beyond the mother, to the father, their marriage, the son, and the other daughter. What pieces belong to each is a question and a puzzle. The glue that holds it all together is the breath— the fact that you are continuing to breathe not just for yourself but for all the others both living and dead. This is Cindy Savett's second book about her daughter's death. You will find shards of poems sticking to your psyche for weeks.

—Fran Quinn, author of The Horse of Blue Ink

In her book of stunningly incantatory poems, The Breath, Cindy Savett layers unifying imagery to convey the searing loss and almost incomprehensible grief of mourning the death of her daughter, Rachel. She often refers to Rachel as a sparrow: “You, Bird Child / As a feathered shine / …sparrow.” And winged images: “Cradle my soft fractures, sparrow, / then go” emerge as metaphor for the fleeting, disappearing child. Images of home recur as well. “On winter’s tongue, I paste my child’s feather, / … remember my kiss once hung from her neck. / My house kneels in her black river.” In almost surreal and metaphorical invocations, the poems contend and illuminate, a must-read on terrifying loss.

—Tina Barr, author of Green Target

Cindy Savett’s The Breath is a riveting meditation on grief and resilience. Savett’s vivid, resonant poems create a language for renewal out of the urgent “phantom tongue” of loss. The Breath casts an honest, empathetic eye on the grief process, leading us, achingly, “into the stable of vanished gods” and encouraging us to “pace / within the flame” of absence—to reimagine loss as a transformative practice that can redeem the “hush / left behind.”

—Tony Trigilio, author of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1

Cindy Savett’s The Breath accesses and occupies the territory, real and true, where the living can dwell with the dead. The speaker’s beloved daughter lives on, in spirit and lyric, as she “steps into the stable of vanished gods.” Savett’s skillful elegies hold the daughter’s hand and reader’s attention across the threshold. There is bravery in this grief, the willingness of the speaker to die a little so the lyric can crystalize, as chant and incantation, charm or spell, that conjures crystalline detail in heavy darkness. In these moving poems the organisms of family, marriage, and self sing to survive, connected: “I tightly tie our wet knot, promise you to / darkness so I may remain.”

— Jason Labbe, author of Spleen Elegy

The Breath is a sequence, not so much of elegies, but—as an old Catholic prayer has it—of “sighs, mourning, and weeping in this valley of tears.” Rachel, Cindy Savett’s daughter who died at eight years old over two decades ago, has become the muse of her eerily surreal poetry. The poet keeps addressing the daughter, the daughter keeps replying. Savett says, “I tightly drape you in my lament, trade / your ruin for how I yearn.” This yearning and the poems themselves, filled with infinite silence between electric line breaks, become the way that the poet paradoxically keeps her daughter close to her, alive and breathing. These poems are exhalations and inhalations. The Breath is, ultimately, nothing less than a necessary act of salvation for both mother and daughter.

—Donald Platt, author of One Illuminated Letter of Being,
Man Praying, and Tornadoesque

I’m drawn to the otherworldly, sensual, and mythic terrain of the poems in Cindy Savett’s The Breath. This is a place of conjuring, invitation, loss, and rebirth, of elemental planes inhabited by starlings and “phantom tongues” as well as the dead and living in all their tender, earthly iterations and dreamed mysterious expanse. These interior meditations on the beloved do the hard work of elegizing while weaving flecks of timelessness through shaped language that requires embrace and embodiment of what’s no longer there. When Savett boldly states: I grasp how you remain—we believe it.

—Michelle Bitting, author of Notes to the Beloved

Cindy Savett is the author of Child in the Road (Parlor Press) and the chapbooks, The Story of my Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, and Overtures of Survival. Her work is also found in the anthology, Challenges for the Delusional. Educated at The Baldwin School, Gratz College, and The University of Pennsylvania, she studied the impact of sociological and religious thought on existential dialogues within the individual, working with Van Harvey, Laurence Silberstein, and Victor M. Lidz. The sudden death of her youngest daughter generated a fierce reckoning in her poems. She lives with her family on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where she leads poetry workshops for psychiatric inpatients at several area hospitals.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 78 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-380-5