Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems

In new poems and old, Sweet Confluence turns and returns to themes of art, music, landscape, and family that have feathered Ludvigson’s lush expressive output over the past twenty-five years.

The twenty new poems resume – Ludvigson’s Wisconsin motif – the cradle of her experience and consciousness–and use Old World European sights, her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, and a southern palette of sight, scent, and sound to explore the fluidly interconnected states of being: memory, emotion, sleep, thought, and sensation, among others. Disclosing an acceptance of the world as it is, never refusing or diminishing life’s full and reaching reality, Ludvigson possesses a joyous maturity that dovetails with the youthful urgency to know and understand exhibited in her early poems.