Sandra Noel’s writing in The River evokes a time and place as languidly fluid as their title suggests. intimate, but inviting, her poems trace themes of coming of age, guilt, family, and loyalty. In a sensual rush of language, Noel’s desire to better understand her childhood and adolescence in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia drives the overarching narrative of this collection. Readers are transported to the banks of the Rappahannock and the central Virginia countryside through Noel’s deft composites of rural tranquility brushed with personal turmoil that hints at the region’s tumultuous past. The River is an examination of history that is equally personal and ubiquitous. A.E. Bayne, Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review
Sandra Noel has written, impossibly, a river surging through the pages of her book, wonderful and dangerous. It is a river of life, to which we are introduced as she boards a train home to bury her mother and clear out her childhood Virginia home. In flickering celluloid images, frame by eloquent frame, she conjures moments that fluoresce on the page, like the fireflies she once caught and put in her hair, when she could imagine being a goddess wearing a starry universe. Deliberately, fatefully, the poems move into danger, violence, struggle, ambiguity. At times, as in describing the mayfly’s single flight, they transcend, merging and harmonizing the book’s themes.
Rayna Holtz, letterpress printer, environmentalist and retired librarian
The language in Sandra Noel’s poetry is, at its best, felt and dramatic: ramshackle thrill rides and handlers, and bootlegged sloe gin. She learns from carnival rides, rivers, horses, and the little miracles of childhood. Sadness, death, and loss also permeate these poems, as well as the transformation that can result from endurance. I admit to a favorite: Inside the Antique Bookshop, where she talks with a Viet Nam Veteran who likes Charles Bukowski. She resists Bukowski but buys the book anyway, reads a line or two in her car before concluding that: Poetry is absolution enough. This phrase is a fitting and strong conclusion to the poem, and I think a fine tribute to Noel’s love of the craft. It is her briefest essay on how poetry brings solace, why verse endures as strongly as grief itself.
Gerry McFarland, previously on editorial board of Floating Bridge Press, his poetry has appeared in Crucible, Crab Creek Review, and many other publications
