Description:
Beth Bentley's wide-ranging poems reflect on her deep love of art and philosophy, crystalline remembrances of friends and family, and on the lives of cultural figures from history.
Brief description: Beth Bentley's work has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, The Nation, Saturday Review, Seattle Review, and Fine Madness. Her collections include: Little Fires (1998); The Purely Visible (1980); Philosophical Investigations (1977); Country of Resemblances (1976); Field of Snow (1973); and Phone Calls from the Dead (1972). Beth also selected and edited The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall (1980).Her awards and honors include: Montalvo Award, 1987; Washington State Governor's Award for Phone Calls from the Dead and for Country of Resemblances; Bookseller's Award for Phone Calls from the Dead; and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, 1976/77. She was a fellow of the NEA in 1978 and that same year read at the Library of Congress. She took several trips to France in the 1970s while working on translations of contemporary French women poets. Her play about the Bronte sisters, "Speak, Radiant Angel," was produced by Seattle's Readers' Theater.She taught poetry in the Northwest and elsewhere for over 30 years, including the course "Writing Contemporary Poetry" at the UW from 1980 to 1992. She also founded and directed the Northwest Poets' Reading Series at the Seattle Public Library from 1960 to 1974, and taught poetry to children at the Kirkland Arts League, as a Poet-in-the-Schools for Tacoma Public Schools and Lake Washington School District, and at the Cornish College of the Arts in the 1970s.
Review Quotes:
"Her writing, dense with remembered moments, blazes with sudden intensity." -Paul Hunter, author of Breaking Ground, Mr. Brick & the Boys, and Stubble Field
"[Bentley's] genius for metaphor shines... [and] reflects not only the magnitude of the individual poem but the magnitude of poetry itself, a magnitude displayed on every page of this remarkable book." -Linda Bierds, author of The Hardy Tree, Roget's Illusions, and First Hand
"Missing Addresses holds the music, forms, astute observations, and wit of Beth Bentley's finest work. This volume is, quite simply, a tour de force."
-Judith Skillman, author of House of Burnt Offerings, Premise of Light, and The Phoenix
"Just as with someone flipping through an old address book who sees the names of those no longer among us, an image or sound returns that resonates for a long, long time." -Sharon Hashimoto, author of The Crane Wife and More American
"Nimble and often playful, she is never less than deadly serious. [A] fine, overdue collection." -Anne Pitkin, author of Yellow, Winter Arguments, and But Still, Music
"Missing Addresses begins by inhabiting familiar feelings of loss and wry hope the poet experiences when readying her garden for winter; her subjects expand ever outward to other places and people, some of whom she addresses directly and some whom she unerringly becomes." -Sherry Rind, author of The Storehouse of Wonder and Astonishment, Between States of Matter, and A Fall Out the Door
"Beth Bentley writes with sharp imagistic detail, illuminating her physical and psychological landscapes.... Beauty and brutal honesty are juxtaposed."
-Daphne Davies, author of Hazel's Star