The Owl Question: Poems (May Swenson Poetry Award Series)

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 transformation to poetry, Shearin has created the very "map" she wishes to guide her when she "can't learn the world fast enough." Judge for the competition was Mark Doty, internationally known poet, winner of the Bingham Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and many other major poetry awards. In the foreword, Doty writes of Shearin's poetry: "What she wishes, wisely, is to be able to love and to see clearly at once. She understands that to do so will require all her resources: irony, good cheer, truthfulness, humor and a carefully preserved attention to the strangeness of living, the pecularity of all enterprises. The result is a lovely, trustworthy first book, full of affection and wry clarity, 'all life's finite hope leaning closer for a kiss.'" Faith Shearin was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in journals that include Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Poetry Northwest and many others. She has worked in a taffy store, interviewed elk hunters, read tea leaves and taught high school English. She earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and currently resides in Baltimore, where she is visiting writer at American University. The Owl Question is Faith Shearin's first full-length book of poems.

• 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.