Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sholeh Wolpé’s third collection of poems, is a surreal journey of sorrows and sins, of love, ghosts, and Saudi princes, of banishment inside one’s own skin. Wild in its leaps and images, these poems explore personal and psychological exile from a marriage, lovers, expectations, and finally, country.
Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths
$22.95
Poems by Sholeh Wolpé
88 pages, 5.5 x 8.5
978-1-55728-628-4 (paper)
2013
“A gifted Iranian-American poet beautifully explores love and the loss of love, beauty and war and the ghosts of the past.”
—Tom Lavoie in Shelf Awareness
“When Sholeh Wolpé asks in Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, ‘How hard is it to write a love song?’ she is reflecting on beauty and love in times of war and personal upheaval. She is reflecting on poetry’s absurd covenant with pain, loss, and violence—and its promise to find beauty through these human horrors. Her beautiful poems are at once sensual, meditative, raw in their honesty, and judicious in their fit use of language. This collection delights and disturbs, often in the very same poem.”
—Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems
“Like dreams peopled with healing clues, Wolpe’s poems are rich with surrealism and harmony, telling deep truths of women across cultures and languages.”
—Annie Finch, author of Spells