Description

White Sail at Midnight

by Ginny Lowe Connors

In Maggie Smith’s well-known poem “Good Bones,” the speaker claims “The world is at least fifty percent terrible…” And although some of the poems in Ginny Lowe Connors’ White Sail at Midnight do confront the terrible, they do so in balance with poetry that takes the reader on an exploration of mystery and beauty in this world we inhabit. Follow with Connors on her quest to determine what may be preserved as time passes, as these poems of mortality call out to the eternal.

 

Early Praise for White Sail at Midnight:

White Sail at Midnight is a quietly comprehensive book of poems.  Connors’ adept use of language and syntax shifts natural paradigms and teases out the extraordinary in the everyday: the sky becomes a “bowl of blue,” and “bittersweet” becomes a double entendre of nightshade and sorrow.  Whether rendering meditation on the poignantly perplexing beauty of impermanence, measuring time and passage in pastoral images, or considering her worldview through the lens of the Connecticut landscape, each poem is startling and fresh in its method and presentation.

—Antoinette Brim-Bell,  Connecticut State Poet Laureate

A quality of attentive wonder charges and characterizes the beautifully crafted, thought-provoking poems in Ginny Connors’s White Sail at Midnight. Through these meditations about personal experiences, relationships, and the lives of others, Connors explores the reality and mystery of existing in this world and universe. Acknowledging that “we are so alone” and that “suffering and grief are guaranteed,” the poet shows a life lived “grateful and terrified”—one that soberly faces “you have to figure out / which way to go, and sometimes you guess wrong,” and at the same time, one that is awed by the world’s “restless beauty…trying to take hold,” and “mortality calling out to the eternal.” Here is the earnest and candid work of a seasoned poet.

—Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Author of Common Grace

. . . this jeweled mosaic, shivering slightly/ in the breeze that wafts up from the lake. . .

Connors is describing an orb spider’s web, the beads of rain on it shimmering in windblown sunlight, but the image serves as an apt emblem for this collection of poems about being mortal in a mortal world.  Finely woven, out in the open, Ginny Lowe Connors’ poems catch the momentary light and shadow of transformations and survivals, sorrows and healings. Connors meets the world, “this unfathomable wildness,” with gratitude, terror, and wonder.  Her poems are finely observed, deeply felt, offered to us with a quiet generosity. What can we do but meet them with a deep bow?

—Margaret Gibson, Connecticut Poet Laureate Emerita, author of The Glass Globe

About the Author

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of five previous poetry collections, the most recent of which is Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake (Turning Point, 2021). Among her awards are the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize, and the Founders Award, sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She was named “Poet of the Year” by NEATE (New England Association of Teachers of English). In 2018 she was named the winner of Passager’s annual Poetry Contest.  Essays and book reviews she’s written have appeared in such publications as the Hartford Courant, Baltimore Review, New York Journal of Books, Switchback, and North American Review. In 2023 Connors was Writer in Residence at Trail Wood, former home of naturalist Edwin Way Teale. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As publisher of her own press, Grayson Books, Connors has edited a number of poetry anthologies, including Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry. A Board Member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, she is co-editor of Connecticut River Review.