Seaside Poems

Imagine a place where "there is no wind, only a voice like a lover's touch" and you will find yourself immersed in this collection. The poet Clarissa Jakobsons has found a way to shorelines, and the white moon egret, where rosemary scents the warm air. You will find back porches and aprons and the Mendocino redwoods. You will find solace in the cobalt horizon, dunes and kelp, steamship whistles, and Pacific cypress trees. As you turn each page, you will understand why you must spend time with seaweed ripples and royal palms. In these moments you will become the "scribe under a slivered moon," while carefully watching "wild stallions in the wind."

-Connie Post, author, Between Twilight and Broken Metronome

Clarissa Jakobsons' poems traverse many special New England beaches, with their egrets and sandpipers, and always the shells with their messages, then briefly touch down where "Lake Erie appears like an ocean cradling its light," before they land on the West Coast, where "Seven bridges cross the bay," talking to the waves, whispering back to her readers.

-Diane Kendig, author, Woman with a Fan: On Maria Blanchard

Clarissa Jakobsons' Seaside Poems: Talking to the Waves demonstrates poetry at its finest, not only in its consistent rich insistence on affirmation, but also in its depth of wisdom, reflected in poem after poem's precision of imagery, recalling Kunitz and Williams, and harking back to the controlled descriptions of the old Chinese poets. Here you'll delight in poems that reach back into her Lithuanian ancestry and forward into insights she shares with her grandchildren, but mostly, her attention is laser-focused on the aliveness of the moment, interweaving the astrological and the geographical, sky and earth, the imagination with the here and now. These poems bring us to Jakobsons' happy place: the sea and shoreline that inspire and renew, where observation meets myth. Read these poems, scribed "under a slivered moon," and be illuminated by this wise, generous, and clear-eyed chronicler of the seaside, "where eternity meets the world's beginning."

-Philip Terman, author, My Blossoming Everything