Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around
Praise
Haunted by the ghosts of Eadweard and Flora Muybridge and framed by the inescapable cage of family, Virginia Bell’s formally adventurous Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around is a captivating work of poetic imagination, capturing in words what even a camera typically can’t.
~ Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
Virginia Bell’s Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around is a complex look at childhood (our own and those of our children), parenting, old age, our beloved dead, and how we inhabit the faces of everyone who has come before us. Bell captures in poetry the movement of film—slow-motion plates, fast forwards, zoom shots, expansive pans, and flashbacks. She draws on such “tricks” to enhance memory or question it entirely. This poet excels at the ekphrasis mode. Her inventive gestures (such as her series of “Invention of…” poems) and her engagement with other arts adds yet another “turn” to this wildly beautiful collection.
~ Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
In Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around, Virginia Bell opens for her reader something intimate: her process. Using constraints of form and prompts, she then masters them as a departure. Lifelong obsessions are turned to the side as the first of these – mother – dies. It is as complicated, of course, to speak with the dead as with the living. Here, Bell’s mind is our guide, her tools fluency with literature, science, anatomy, mathematics, language. I always learn something from Bell’s poems, and this collection is as thick with discovery as a library, laboratory, volume of accounting. Generous, tough, symbolic, sardonic, these poems feel essential for any of us interested in looking
backward in order to see forward, and if we wish, to look towards love.
~ Valerie Wallace, author of House of McQueen
Virginia Bell’s poems are ekphrastic-driven meditations on motherhood, movement, and grief where Muybridge’s photographs serve as an unlikely muse to challenge the male gaze and to delve into the “hidden eye” of “grief-time.” “The Ultimate End-of-Life Checklist,” the centerpiece of the collection, is a crown of free verse sonnets on the absurd mundanity surrounding the winnowing of her mother’s life. The collection often alternates between prose poems and free verse sonnets, ironic forms that belie the chaos of managing the mess of life. Bell is a flaneur of memory. If an essay is the meandering movement of the mind and a lyric poem a moment in time, then Bell’s poems thrive on the taut tension between the two.
~ Steven Teref, author of Man Without Qualities
In this stunning new collection, Virginia Bell explores what she describes as “the box of the mind” in all of its complexity. Bell’s poetic speaker is a restless explorer, always looking, interrogating, doubting, and then landing on surprising insights. Through a range of forms and modes, these beautiful, deeply intelligent poems explore what we collect, what we disregard, what we refuse to forget, and what we grieve. I will return to this work again and again.
~ Joanne Diaz, author of The Lessons
Virginia Bell is our poet-hero in Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around as she guides us through acts of caregiving for the ‘death-near’ in our lives, of grappling with the grief of loved ones gone too soon, of mothering grown sons while mindful of all the meanings of ‘mother.’ With formal dexterity and expertly handled knowledge, these are poems that peel back the sheen of memories and art like skin to reveal blemishes and scars, old wounds and aches, ugly truths which are ultimately beautiful [insert Keats lines about beauty and truth here]. You’ll want to lift this book from the ground and turn the pages over and over again.
~ Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown
Glass Lyre Press
Publication Date: February 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9916673-3-3
Retail Price: $16.00
Watch Birute Sodeikaite’s short film “In Perpetuum.”