Empty Gate

by Susan Thackrey

Poetry. San Francisco poet Susan Thackrey's debut book of poetry, EMPTY GATE -- a long-awaited superb first book (Norma Cole) collects six sequences of poems in a work of singular endeavor, attention, and lyric intelligence. Ms.Thackrey, a member of the inaugaural class in poetics at New College of California when that program was created around the occasion of Robert Duncan's teaching, now works in San Francisco as a practicing analyst. EMPTY GATE is dedicated to Duncan, and opens with an epigraph from William of Aquitaine's Proven‡al Farai un vers de dreyt nien (I'll make a verse of pure nothing) Out of negatives then, such silences (so what is it that holds its shape / shot full of holes maintains its hold / informs on us in time) the question becomes how to find a way, unfounded just here. EMPTY GATE joins Norma Cole's MARS and Duncan McNaughton's VALPARAISO as the third book in the Listening Chamber Poetry Series.

84 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999