Edgewater

<p>In <em>Edgewater</em> her powerfully moving and redemptive third collection Ruth L. Schwartz writes with consummate passion precision and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world human and natural. In poems both lyrical and grit-laced she grapples with her twofold central question: How can we love fully open-eyed and openhearted amid all the flaws and beauty each other and the world? How could we not? -- Jane Hirshfield<p>Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body the daily possibility of joy and the deep struggle not only to make sense of but to affirm a world where the terrorists 'opened fire: / as if it were a box now cracked / consuming its own lid and hinges / sparking out unstoppable / into the tender / flammable world. . . ' -- Mark Doty<p>Ruth L. Schwartz has reached a level of poetic maturity that we're used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry.... She assumes a public voice in these poems which speak to us rather than at us in the way they offer moral solutions to the problems of our modern world. She does this ... by reaching after and trying to understand the natural world and her place therein and by modulating her poems with a subtle ghostly music which has the capacity to lull us into understanding more about ourselves and about the wonderful ambiguities of living life most fully. -- Bruce Weigl