The View from Over Here

The View From Way Over Here, a collaboration between the poets Alba DiBello and Ed Ryterband, is overdue. A conversation among two accomplished writers in their ninth decades, Alba asks, while considering the pros and cons of retirement, "How can you not / open that gift / poke around the possibilities / find out who else you might be?" Not a question for or from the faint of heart. So, Ed affirms, while listening to a song, "I hum along, mouth the words. / Start to dance around my den. / Rev up my dated moves," in a tercet that is perfectly tuned and timed to its subject. I've experienced a sense of luck while reading this powerful book. Alba DiBello and Ed Ryterband have offered us a gift emerging from lives alert and well-lived. A candid conversation takes place in these pages: bold, brave, and fully life- and love-affirming.

-Rick Benjamin, former Poet Laureate of Rhode Island and author, Passing Love

This collection of poems invites the reader into a conversation between two poets who comment on the world around them from their unique "perch" of advanced age. Their conversation spans transitions, from a career-oriented life to new ways of knowing the world and themselves, to looking ahead at how they each view, as they call it, the endgame. Their poems will resonate with people of any age. They are intimate, poignant, often funny and always candid. The poets feel they still have something to say, and what they have to say is worth listening to.

-Maria Mazziotti Gillan, editor, Patterson Literary Review and author, All That Lies Between Us

A duet, a literary dialog, a line-dance of words - The View From Way Over Here by Alba DiBello and Ed Ryterband is a rare poetic conversation, and this one between Alba and Ed is, as they call it, "from the perch of old age." Throughout, we feel the heart-to-heart that poetry provides, as Alba and Ed remind each other of old friends, children, spouses, and how age sculpts the body and the mind. Read The View From Way Over Here and, whatever your season of life, come home to the luminous now.

-Susanna Rich, Wild Nights Productions, L.L.C., Professor Emerita: Kean University, and author, Surfing For Jesus