The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

The quality of passionate wisdom in the poetry of Laure-Anne Bosselaar astonishes and grips the reader. This poet confronts us, finally, with recognition of our universal responsibility for being. "Think of it," she says, "the worlds in this world," while "an infant/ sucks from a nipple, a grenade/ shrieks"; while a Chinese woman painstakingly sews one silk stitch "guards [take] only/ seconds to mop up a cannibal's brain from the floor/ of a Wisconsin jail. What a range of human emotion is here - all that is, but self-pity. Even through shattering childhood years boarded in a Belgian convent school, Bosselaar's connection with the pain of others helps her survive. The title poem, "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf," vividly portrays the ways a rejected child and the town outcast could give spiritual nurture to each other. Sifted through the filter of mature experience, the telling resonates as elegy for "the bearded ogre. In the book's first section located in the Europe of her childhood, drama reverberates, and powerful story; but Bosselaar blends authenticity of memoir with fearless poetic resonance. Images dramatize feeling. "The Cellar" pounds with the child's projection of her terror onto potatoes as living, hurting creatures: "uprooted and cluttered in crates,/ limbs groping for a wedge of light from a cellar door." The child's body, too, puts out tendrils of yearning for root-nourishment. This is the child who will grow up to be the poet who sees in tumbleweed and snowflakes the loneliness of "lost souls roaming. The later parts of the book speak in quiet tones of loving marriage, of the American landscape, and gratitude for the sanctity of the ordinary. From her courageous journey, Laure-Anne Bosselaar brings us the gift of true poetic insight. 

-- From Independent Publisher