MEASURELESS SILENCE

<p>There is a music in these poems that works magic with the particularity of the images to create a whole body experience out of which willows swans and bison rise as if from within our own being untamed and untameable. In <em>Measureless Silence</em> Christine Mulvey has composed a symphony of words that sings the wonder and devastation that is our world. Each poem is a summons whether through the wrap of forest or the harsh light of glitz and bling to discover ourselves as the wild itself: pristine ravaged and innocent as snow as wings as wind.</p><p><strong>-Kim Rosen</strong> author of <em>Saved by a Poem: the Transformative Power of Words</em></p><p><br></p><p>Cris Mulvey's <em>Measureless Silence</em> is an ode to the vast wild open spaces of Montana and the Western United States and also to the wildness within. In gorgeous lyrical language and sensuous imagery she celebrates everything uncaptured/ undefiled/...all that cannot be/ that still refuses/ to be/ tamed. Mountains prairies bison rivers and this sky/ unfathomable/ thundering/with magnificent/indifference-these are the true protagonists of these poems while the self becomes vulnerable and insignificant yet also finds itself at home in this stark wilderness seen in winter. By contrast the poems set in cityscapes show a tawdry poverty of soul there in which the narrator feels hollow-boned with longing to return to the wild. Come with me out to where the soft round shapes/ of the fallen snow lie draped across the bushes like the thighs/ and hips of a sleeping god curled up on the open bedspread of the land Mulvey invites and we are eager to follow her through this beautiful collection of poems.</p><p><strong>-Maxima Kahn</strong> author of <em>Fierce Aria</em></p><p><br></p><p>This poet knows the wild. In this collection she invites us to trust our senses and our longing to enter a sacristy of sensuality and song to remember what is holy in the untamed within and without. Even in the few poems where the soulless isolation of the city or human intervention reminds us of our own separation the poet returns us over and over to the sacred and the sensuous to mystery lifting our eyes from our lowly state to something more to our connection with everything uncaptured to the wild to the feral silence of heaven on earth.</p><p><strong>-Mary Jo Amani</strong> MFA Pacific University</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>