Owl Question: Poems

by Faith Shearin

Book Overview

Winner of the sixth annual May Swenson Poetry Award, The Owl Question underscores and relishes life's transitions from young girl to woman, from child to wife to mother, and from isolation to connection this poet's bright sense of abundance and awe, here expressed in finely tuned detail and refreshingly open observation, reads like a collective memory. Though private and closely held, these questionings are as familiar as our own souls, and in their...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874214440
• ISBN13: 9780874214444
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Length: 73 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous Imagery

Absolutely wonderful book of poetry. She captures sentiment without being sentimental. Even non-readers of poetry will enjoy this.

Brief yet evocative verse

Winner of the May Swenson poetry award, The Owl Question by Faith Shearin is a unique collection of brief yet evocative verse, featuring a foreword by Mark Doty (an international poet and the appointed judge for the 2002 May Swenson Award). Examining adolescence, nature, femininity, parenthood, daily life, and more, these inspirational and deftly written verses often carry a down-to-earth, narrative-event tone. My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog./He who kicked dogs in anger when I was a child,/who liked his comb always on the same shelf,/who drank martinis to make his mind quiet./He who worked and worked/- his shirts/wrapped in plastic, his heart ironed/like a collar./He who - like many men -/ loved his children but thought the money/he made for them was more important/than the rough tweed of his presence.

A Good First Book

Faith Shearin's debut book of poems tells a compelling story. The speaker in these poems begins as a child, becomes a childless wife and ,in a final transformation, finds herself a mother. The book is full of humor and wise observation. She describes her yearning for a child this way: "I hold nothing in my arms. The nothing feels light and heavy at the same time.." The stories these poems weave together are both particular and individual (a mother's untidy kitchen, a father's eccentric love for his dog) and wonderfully universal.