Barbara Blatner, The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, January 22

Barbara Blatner is a poet, playwright & composer-musician who I last saw in this area reading at the Albany Art Gallery in 1990; I remember fondly a poetry chapbook she published called The Pope in Space (Intertext Press, 1984). She currently lives in Manhattan & teaches at Yeshiva University.

On this day she did a book-signing & brief reading at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza for her new book of poems, The Still Position: a verse memoir of my mother's death (NYQ Books, 2010). The poems depict Barbara's mother, Betty's, last days, Monday to Friday, with brief sections "before" & "after." She read a selection of poems, "home!", "as you lay dying," "your vision," "the buck on the lawn," "dying as trickery," "last breath," & "I see it in my mind." The poems are filled with the little details of attending a person in their last days & hours, many of the poems as delicate as breath itself. Her book is available at the Book House.

It was nice to see this fine poet back again, however briefly, in Albany.