Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer

by Susan Terris

Poetry. Even as "sailors know a storm/ is close when all their knots have drawn tight," so these taut, intricate poems enact the dramatic encounter of opposing forces: high Romantic flight meets... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965701581
• ISBN13: 9780965701587
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Arctos Press
• Length: 92 Pages

Customer Reviews

Don't miss this wonderful book!

FIRE IS FAVORABLE TO THE DREAMER is a lively and interesting book of poems.  These are not poems so obscure that the reader has no idea what the poet is saying but poems about love and loss.  There are personal poems of love and loss, but much of the book is narrative poems about real people such as Mary Todd Lincoln, Picasso, or the sailors of the Russian submarine the Kursk.  In contrast to these poems, some of the work is surreal and has the aura of myth or fairy tale.  This is a collection of immense breadth and depth.  I meant to open it and read a few poems but found myself reading on and on. I can't recommend it highly enough!

Candor & Light: A Review of Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer

If you buy one poetry book in the year 2003, make it Fire Is Favorable to the Dreamer, by Susan Terris. Sorrows of everyday life discover their niches, then move beyond the mundane into a world where grief itself teaches us to harbor the light within. Among my favorite poems were "Breaking Away From the Family" in which the author remembers her father's death: "Mother's pork sausage fingers" and the "stiff portrait" of five faces left behind. Terris is a poet with the gift of understatement and grace. Stark, emotional realities are made into art and laced with a hint of mystery. Her readers will meet death, cancer, the roles of men and women, and growing up -- all in compelling new ways. Section three (entitled Blue Roses) is reminiscent of Tennessee Williams' famous play The Glass Menagerie, where light affords studious appraisal of one's life and mortal limits. Terris is one of the most profound and eloquent new voices in Amercian poetry today. Janet I. Buck, author of Calamity's Quilt