Deborah Fleming

Earthrise Deborah Fleming

Flowers have replaced gods, but the self-in-the-world is still clear and epic if haunted by memory. Formally rigorous and intellectually capacious, these poems of objects, lives, and places aren't like heroes that "know themselves too late." These poems know themselves quite well, which is why they are so bracing and so rewarding.

.-Christopher Cokinos, Institute of the Environment, University of Arizona

In Earthrise Deborah Fleming's geographically wide-ranging poems cohabit with intensely local ones that invite us to witness animals and plants, landscapes, and cultural artifacts in two states: enduring beauty or long despoliation by human greed. Here are ancient historical ruins and the atom-bombed islands of the South Pacific, Irish wolfhounds, and disappearing glaciers blasted Appalachian mountaintops and a hayfield in Gascony. Here also are herons and barn swallows and family heirlooms like old tables and watches. What binds them together is that they all exist on "the only island we've been given," referencing astronaut William Anders' famous photograph of earthrise from lunar orbit. Fleming reminds us that the world's shared past and its daily present are all implicit in that image, details of the great drama of life on earth.

-Richard Hague, author of Studied Days: Poems Early & Late in Appalachia

From the first line of the first poem in Deborah Fleming's latest collection, posing the urgent question, Was it Gutenberg or Copernicus? I was hooked. And by the time I got to the question near the end, opening the poem "Isak Dinesen in Denmark," Have I lived only once that I am so many? I was amazed and pleased to find a poet asking the very questions that often keep me up at night. From poems that take us to the stars and Skellig Islands, to Moreno Garden at Bordighera and Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska, to one fractured "zone of sacrifice," the reader must be prepared for the ride of her life. Resplendent with wildlife and language that reverberates with significance, Earthrise inspires readers to be open to it all.

-Diana Woodcock, author of Tread Softly and Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale