Borrowed Rooms

These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, watches the doors irrevocably close on a marriage, and delights in the temporal beauty surrounding her. Pelman deftly uses a range of forms: sonnets, sestinas, ghazals and glosas. The poems, with surprising intensity and tactile clarity, show the poet’s perspective of the familiar changing, and ultimately finding a sense of home.