Susan Sibbet
Susan Sibbet
Susan Herron Sibbet (1942–2014)
Susan Herron Sibbet, one of the seven founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, published her first full-length poetry collection, No Easy Light, with the press in 2004. She was also the author of two poetry chapbooks, the coauthor of a third, and the author of a combined cookbook and book of poems, Burnt Toast and Other Recipes. A long-time San Francisco resident, Susan was devoted to California Poets in the Schools, where she served both as acting director and president of the board and taught for many years in the CPITS program for younger children. Her novel, The Constant Listener, a fictional memoir by Theodora Bosanquet, the amanuensis to Henry James, will be published this fall by Ohio University Press.
Great Blue
Great Blue, a posthumous collection of poems by Susan Herron Sibbet, spans three decades, from her first published works to her death in 2013. Her world is large, encompassing both nature’s bounty—great blue herons, two vast blue oceans, the blue globe itself—and the smallest details of domestic life: jam jars, broken china, burnt toast. Her voice is that of a woman fully engaged in what makes us human: the tangled emotions of family, the love of language, the embrace of living, the awareness of death. Great Blue embodies all that is dear to us, from the sorrows of our conflicted lives to the sudden joys of existence.
No Easy Light
“What a gorgeous book of poems. Wide spaces and sprinkles of stars surround the most intimate details of life in kitchens and gardens. In No Easy Light, we enter a large world held together by a woman embracing time, the spaces between things and the things themselves: husband, animals, weaving, cooking, hidden chocolate, curries, french fries, sweet loneliness, waiting mothers and sisters, a father forever at sea, the missing daughter sent down the river like the baby in the basket lost in rushes and finally found.
No Easy Light is a playful, brilliant song to life, with one woman’s love the glowing circle around it all.” —Susan Wooldridge
Read poems from No Easy Light by Susan Sibbet.