Changing Faces

by Betsy Sholl

“…Antonio Machado used to say the capacity for wonder is the source of true poetry, and this is the magical ingredient I find in Betsy Sholl… All, or almost all, of Sholl’s poems are coming from a center whose discipline of attention (in a spiritual sense) and discipline of language coincide. This means she is working… where the richest ore lies.”
—Luis Ellicott Yglesias, New Boston Review

“The collection is distinctly American, the language, the voice, the way she sets her private dreams and memories against a flat indifferent landscape…The poems sing a familiar song, but the particulars are her own, without self-pity or excessive egoism.”
—Fanny Howe

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Betsy Sholl has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009). Don't Explain won the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin, and her book The Red Line won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Pick A Card, winner of the Maine Chapbook Competition in 1991, and Betsy Sholl: Greatest Hits, 1974-2004, Pudding House Publications. She was a founding member of Alice James Books and published three collections with them: Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter and Rooms Overhead. Among her awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and two Maine Writer's Fellowships. Her work has been included in several anthologies, including Letters to America, Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and a range of magazines, including Field, Triquarterly, Brilliant Corners, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal. She has been a visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh and Bucknell University. She lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College.

As of March 1, 2006, Betsy Sholl was chosen to be the Poet Laureate of Maine, a five-year position named by the governor.