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Barbara's Books
Barbara Helfgott Hyett has published five collections of poetry:
Her most recent collection, Rift, considers, from close and afar, the elemental forces coming to bear on human character in our time. In one sense a consideration of a time of great personal loss, a personal explication of long marriage and its betrayal, these stunning poems take solace in nature's steadfastness, and in the prospect of a newly resilient self, awakened to the predicament of a battered world.
Book Reviews
"Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s poems reflect both her anguish and her fervor; their warmth elevates the reader to spiritual heights."
—Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate & author of Night
"Helfgott Hyett’s poems about love, infidelity and the body in all its guises are tough, tender, and juicy."
—Maxine Kumin, author of Still to Mow
"Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Rift is a book born of acute psychic necessity and there is not a trifle or bauble in it....Faced with the annihilation of the life she has known, Helfgott Hyett employs her imagination, her learning, and her poetic virtuosity to search among biblical and mythic narratives, arctic expeditions, memories, meteor showers, classical and romantic art, and history for a way forward. This book is that way, a profound gift to all of us. The title sequence is itself a major work, a rich, polyvocal, unflinching vision of the world we live in now."
—Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House, Without Paradise, and Gold Star Road
"Helfgott Hyett takes up the theme of loss, specifically the break-up of a long marriage, in poems that are direct and detailed, with a power rooted in restraint and compression. Her imagery is clear and often surprising, as in these opening lines: ‘He rises slowly, so as/ not to wake her. An ox is/ that careful as it tears the grasses...’ She captures each moment with precision, her ear for dialogue unerring, as in these lines: ‘She lay her face on his thighs./... He patted her hair/... Poor you, he told the top of her head./ His boat shoes were tapping/ the cabinet. It was all/ he could do not to run.’ These poems, wrung from grief, anger, and disillusionment, return again and again to an affirmation of the hard work of living."
—Ellen Bass, author of Courage to Heal and The Human Line
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Book Reviews
"Hyett marries fact to lyric....Hers is an original conception, one I confess I view with envy."
—Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winning poet
"Wonderful poetry, haunting and evocative—a reminder to us all that wilderness in its aesthetic splendor is vanishing."
—Thomas Eisner, Schuman Professor of Chemical Ecology, Cornell University, & Chairman, Endangered Species Coalition
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Book Reviews
"This book is a genuine contribution to the literature on Columbus and exploration, and a welcome widening of the sometimes rather cramped visions and ambitions of contemporary poetry."
—C.K. Williams, poet & National Book Award winner
"There is a breathlessness, a lyric eroticism in these lines. One feels that the passion that fueled Columbus has entered the poet."
—Ruth Whitman, Sojourner
"Hyett gives Columbus buffs and general readers a way into the mind and heart of the explorer. Her descriptions of the minutiae of the sailors' lives is compelling and realistic...This reader felt as if she were on the ship."
—Judith Hemschemeyer, poet & translator of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
"There is probably no better memorial to Columbus than Hyett's beautiful poetry. She has gone beyond the admiral's formal journal entries and captured not only his soul but the spirit of the enterprise."
—Robert H. Fulson, author of The Log of Christopher Columbus
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Book Reviews
"Hyett's Atlantic City (Natural Law) comes clamoring back in these deeply rooted poems. Her loyalties and losses become ours, bursting their colors across the 'rented walls of our childhood.'"
—Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winning poet
"Rich with experience, with the kind of poignant wisdom gentle reflection on experience brings, these are very various poems, sometimes calm, sometimes boisterous, often touching, but always delicate and morally generous."
—C.K. Williams, poet & National Book Award winner
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Book Reviews
"...stark as the stark realities it confronts, as brutally honest as the brutal universe it evokes. The 'liberation' its poems describe was a liberation only for a fighting few sad survivors. For the dead, and for the rest of humanity, it was a condemnation of the soul from which in some ways we shall never recover. This is a valuable and unfortunately a necessary work."
—C.K. Williams, Poet and National Book Award winner
"The very 'unliterariness' of these lines only heightens their effect. Of several recent poetry volumes devoted to the Holocaust, this is by far the most worthy as history."
—Booklist, 15 June 1986
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