Clutching Lambs

Lucid, mysterious, inviting… These qualities of Janet Passehl’s poems are the opposite of obscurity, though their lines evade simple resolution into narrative. Rather, they seem to open lit rooms in which haunting, haunted phrases stand together, the makings of conversations hanging in the air between them. Like some wordless works of visual art, they create a space, and charge it with possibility rather than filling it with things. If that seems abstract, think again; notice the tender strangeness with which space inside a baby’s lungs is figured, ‘white and stiff like drinking straws’, or this moment of grace: ‘his light shone through my paleness and made a lamp of me’. These lives are fragile, and the white rug in a sparsely furnished rooms is one ‘across which to navigate spillage and regret’. These poems with an artist’s sensibility leave all our senses - taste, smell, sight and sound and the nameless one that registers presence - more alive and open.
- Philip Gross

Language, that fluid and evolving medium, is here expertly plied and animated to confront the dilemma of depiction and to convey the nearly unsayable. Janet Passehl is not just a careful observer, but a scrupulous constructor of poems so unsettling, tender, inventive, and mysterious that savvy readers are sure to embrace Clutching Lambs.

• Jeanne Marie Beaumont

The mood of Janet Passehl’s marvelous collection is wintry, a chiaroscuro of sudden bright flashes and shadowy figures: a child, an architect, two gray animals. We’re in a lapidary dreamscape where interior and exterior worlds collide as an exhalation: ‘that cannot be breached/by sermon/how the prow of a ship breaks ice/is how language moves.’

• Ann Lauterbach