THE DROPPED HAND
				Terry Blackhawk Paperback - April 2007 84 Pages ISBN: 978-0-9779703-3-9 USD $14.95 + Shipping

About the Author, Terry Blackhawk

Reviews

To rescue language from itself: this is one of the primary responsibilities of the poet. Terry Blackhawk takes this aim and takes it to the highest of levels by shaping and reshaping language into a poetry that is built to last. In The Dropped Hand, Blackhawk's third full-length book, what is lost is regained, is reclaimed, is remade, into a world that must be, at times cruelly and with great difficulty, relearned. This book is one poet's daring testimony that dares to go to that most inward of places where few books dare to go. It is from such a place, of absence and silence, of "sorrow loosened/ at last," that Blackhawk "pulls songs from the lining of her pockets," from the socket of her heart, "And sings them for you.

Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: ‘abrupt and final / silence.’ If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution. It is poetry’s dream to do just this. - Linda Gregerson

In The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk masterfully weaves threads of loss and grief into a fine tapestry that is both personal and universal.This is, I think, Dr. Blackhawk’s finest and most moving collection. - Naomi Long Madgett

I love the poetry of Terry Blackhawk, above all else, for its heart, always searching for “something bursting with spring and belief.” Through the poems in The Dropped Hand she teaches us both how to hold on and how to let go of those we love. These compassionate poems reach out through the complex world to find the connections that sustain us. She celebrates our exposed places, the places where we are most vulnerable and most human. We so often cover up those places — it takes a magician like Terry Blackhawk to reveal to us what was there all along. - Jim Daniels

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