Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems

One of the first poems in Sweet Confluence, "Gratitude" heralds the collection's project: "More and more I see / how everything goes together....Surely the body is mind's / gift to the soul". The joining that our selves -- mind, body, and soul, so diverse in aspects -- strive for is, as Susan Ludvigson puts it, "the sweet confluence / of salt and sun, of ache / and thrust". In new poems and old, Sweet Confluence turns and returns to themes of art, music, landscape, and family that have feathered this poet's lush expressive output over the past twenty-five years.Twenty new poems explore the fluidly interconnected states of being: memory, emotion, sleep, thought, and sensation, among others. Disclosing an acceptance of the world as it is, never refusing or diminishing life's full and reaching reality, Ludvigson possesses a joyous maturity that dovetails with the youthful urgency to know and understand exhibited in her early work. Selected pieces range from the long persona poems emphasizing Christ's humanness in Trinity to poems from The Beautiful Noon of No Shadow, The Swimmer, and Northern Lights that tell of despair, hope, and the search for identity, often through the real or imagined interludes of actual people. Ludvigson's rich body of poetry, set off to quietly stunning display in Sweet Confluence, verifies a voice splendid since the beginning.