The Beautiful One’s Ark

by Sher A. Schwartz

A lyric collection of poetry exploring contemporary rural/agrarian life in Eastern Oregon. These poems are rooted in place and season. They explore loss, change, transformation, and inter-species sharing. Celebrating sound and expressing a variety of poetic forms, Schwartz’s poems reveal the poet’s life with hunting dogs, donkeys, birds, and the ever-changing environment.

BONUS: Each printed book will include a QR-Code for access to enjoy recordings of Sher reading select poems from the collection. 

Enjoy a Video of Sher reading from the book:

Early Praise for The Beautiful One’s Ark:

Eastern Oregon is a region often over-looked by the rest of the state, its austere, dramatic terrain far removed from the easy green world to the west. Schwartz stands as its advocate and caregiver. Here is a poet who has clearly taken the time to attend to the living world around her, its prairie and drylands, wide-open horizon and wild creatures. This is a collection written with musical lyricism by someone who understands that healing the land heals us as well.

—Caroline Boutard, author of Each Leaf Singing

From her 200-acre rewilding project near the Columbia River comes the bountiful inspiration for Schwartz’s first collection. The poetry is filled with transformations, of myth, of landscape, of species, relationships, and between the domestic and the wild.

The poet has an eye for the illuminating detail, which she sets to a music all her own, “the lower meadow/ sober purple oboe/ sprays hoarfrost solos,” and in the persona poem, “Wolf Eye,” “we lock eye to eye/ The dog, the girl/ Her brown eye, my golden/ Twining curls and silver tipped fur/ But, I burn…”

She sings of an altered climate’s collision with the world she cherishes and has nurtured. The collection holds a graceful, often witty, call for humans to realize their interconnectedness with nature, all of us sharing space on this fragile ark.

—Kim Hamilton, author of Calling Through Water and Visitation

Every reader will want to be aboard The Beautiful One’s Ark as Noah’s wife saves a drowning dragonfly. This whole collection constitutes a love song to the writer’s husband, their farm, and all the animals on that farm – including some they don’t want. Sher Schwartz celebrates dancing donkeys, dogs in the bed, even the mouse in the outhouse and the feline perpetrator of pigeon murder. Praise be to the country life and a poet who so gracefully puts it into words.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Waving Fly Swatters at Angels

About the Author

Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.

In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.

You can hear Sher Schwartz voice poems from many different poets, including her own, at her website: sherpoetry.com

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