The Groundwater Press
67 Edgewood Rd
Port Washington, New York 11050
516-782-8492 zanwasserman@gmail.com
For Immediate Release
Racing Daylight
Poems by Susan Baran
Publication: December 20, 2017 124 pages. LCCN 2017006218
Price: $18 Paper. ISBN 1877593125
Sag Harbor poet Susan Baran’s new collection, Racing Daylight, celebrates the light and life of eastern Long Island, as does the beautiful painting, Thicket and Field, by Jane Freilicher, featured on its wraparound cover. The poems include reflections on the poet’s early life in Manhattan, her years teaching in greater New York, particularly during the terror of 9/11; dedications to painter Ellen Adler, to the late painter Darragh Park, and to the much-missed poet and art critic Gerrit Henry; and the sharp, sweet details of her quietly observed, intensely felt life on Widow Gavits Road.
“What's not to like?” asks John Ashbery, who admired how “the flat land and water of eastern Long Island, where she lives, are constantly stirring in Susan Baran's Racing Daylight. . . . Seldom has the life of poetry coincided so congruently with the life we are trying to live, even as it lives us. Her poetry transfixes and illuminates this mutual act.”
Star Black notes how she “abides by a lucidity wherein James Schuyler’s pastorals permeate the ‘allocution of leaves’ and Anne and Fairfield Porter are nearby in a ‘new translucency’ . . . that creates a ‘zensation,’ a ‘flirtation with flame-tipped glory” elevated to “the ridge beyond / incandescent in the neon sun.’”
As Tom Breidenbach says, Baran “charts moments, seasons, years, and the lives imbuing them with beauty and meaning…the lives of family members, friends, of her cats or a herd of neighborhood cows, or of the various wild birds stopping by her yard. These are Baran’s familiars, in whom she finds persistent cause for the wonder, concern, and perspicacity.”
Susan Baran was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Sag Harbor and Manhattan. She is the author of Harmonious Whole (Groundwater Press, 1989) and The Necessary Boat (Groundwater Press and Painted Leaf Press, 2000). She was the founder and director of the Intuflo Reading Series, and taught science and literature at the Emily Dickinson School. The Groundwater Press is proud to offer its third publication by this remarkable poet.
Groundwater Press Books are distributed by Small Press Distribution:
For more information, please contact publishers Eugene Richie and Rosanne Wasserman at zanwasserman@gmail.com, or see our blog at http://groundwater-zanne.blogspot.com.
