Chalkmarks on Stone

by Carol Moldaw

In these rigorously composed, sensually grounded, lyrical poems, the world is distilled with a compelling logic—from the poet's home in New Mexico to a Jewish cemetery in China. A shifting vowel signals the end of a marriage; with its proboscis, a butterfly taps out the secret names of God. Like the matryoshka doll of one poem, Moldaw's poetry reveals selves within selves with a formal intricacy disarming in its ease. "Another Part of the Field," a long, meditative fugue of six-line poems, uses the I Ching to explore what lies beneath the surface of each day. Here is masterfully evocative poetry of grace, beauty, and surprise.

"Carol Moldaw's poetry is a form of fixed attention, generous-minded and passionately, physically immediate."
—Diane Middlebrook

121 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1998

About the author

Carol Moldaw is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024), and one novella, The Widening (Etruscan Books, 2008). Her poetry collection The Lightning Field (Oberlin Press, 2002) won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, and Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001) was translated into Turkish and published in a bi-lingual edition in Istanbul. A volume of her selected poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming from Guangxi University Press (Beijing) in 2025. Moldaw is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. It has also been anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets. As noted in The New Yorker, Moldaw’s work “repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” About The Lightning Field, Frieda Gardner wrote in The Women’s Review of Books: “She courts revelation . . . in a voice variously curious, passionate, surprised, meditative, and sensual. On the surface of her work are rich sound and variation of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought.” From 2005-2008 Moldaw was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and she has been a recurrent Vistiing Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University. In the spring of 2011, she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Currently, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches privately. A complete list of her books can be found at www.carolmoldaw.com.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M717c 1998