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Many thanks to Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review for this thoughtful review of my new book Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time.

The full review is at the title link but here are some excerpts:

Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time

Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time represents an intersection of nature, human affairs, time, and place. Its poetic adventures juxtapose the immediacy of modern times with insights about the past and future, using jumping-off points as common as a museum visit (“A Modern Day Amazon visits the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”) to draw these connections as Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez wonders:

Where have you gone, all my sisters?

From these marble stone veins

your blood won’t spill

as it once did—on that faraway plain

we tested our battle axes and spears

against Roman swords and plated armor.

Womens’ lives evolve across vast expanses of time and experience as poems capture a different world, as in “Emily Brontë Addresses Her Creation”:

I named you after the things I loved—

the heath I walked on every good day of my life,

the stone cliffs I climbed as a girl,

yours was the companion spirit I found there,

your face the vision that hounded me,

when clouds churned across those wind-worn heights.

As the literary and historical connections unfold, free verse poetry readers will especially appreciate how these rich veins of natural and human concerns dovetail. From a reflection on Lincoln’s 1865 last journey to the milieu of a winter botanic research lab, Fernandez weaves her poetry through a myriad of places and experiences designed to capture a sense of kinship and connection in an age where both seem too often lacking.”

Librarians and readers seeking contemporary poetry that is truly haunting and worthy of reading group and classroom discussion alike will find Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time an extraordinarily perceptive, evocative collection, as in the poem “To ‘The Woman’” (Sherlock Holmes Addresses Irene Adler):

Perhaps it’s only the blinking

of one panther’s gleaming eyes

meeting another’s in a fern-filled jungle.

We were ill-met, it would seem—and yet,

I know I’ll never find your like again.