Lee Sharkey
“Sharkey’s deft and deliberate fusion of the global with the personal transforms mere confession into a searching examination of universal human rights and the suffering which is always present throughout the world. The poems lend a voice to the voiceless and bear witness to our collective need for an understanding of the unspeakable.”
Lee Sharkey (1945-2020) was the author of seven collections of poetry, including Walking Backwards (Tupelo, 2016), A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2007), and To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. She received the 2010 Maine Arts Commission's Individual Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts, the 2017 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, and the 1997 Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché.
In 1974, Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Over the next four years, under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry, portfolios of other poets’ work, and ephemera such as poems on paper lunch bags.
“Sharkey honors the accountability of language by turning her ear to the rhythms of the soul’s survival.””
“If you buy no other book for the next five years, this is a must, must read, must possess.””
A Darker, Sweeter String
poems by lee Sharkey
In this poetry of the moral imagination, Lee Sharkey explores the psychic landscape of cruelty, violence, and war. Her lyric poems draw their imagery from Israel/Palestine, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and small town USA, as well as from the intimate domains of sickness and birth. Sharkey responds to our endangered post-9/11 world with courage and clear-eyed tenderness. In a political climate that threatens sanity, she has composed a music of daring empathy.
Listen to Lee read from A Darker, Sweeter String on From the Fishouse.
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