So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems

by Carol Moldaw

“Here are poems of intelligent consideration and a deft and heart-born music, filled with the gleam of particularity and a lushness of language and substance.” —Jane Hirshfield

"In this collection of poems, Carol Moldaw brings the reader to a world where contrasting things form a union that is distanced by mystery—either by the mystery within the things themselves, or the mystery that surrounds them, yet this bond is necessary and complete … Overall, Moldaw’s poems can be felt much like lightning is felt—as a dashed stroke of electricity that resonates long after the flash dissolves into a vast sky or field." — Jennifer Belcik, Southwestern American Literature


Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars, Carol Moldaw constructs poetry of imaginative daring that illuminates and transforms the life within us all. In So Late, So Soon, “oblique, wily, and intensely intelligent poems” repeatedly achieve, to quote from The New Yorker, “lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” Aurally rich, structurally varied, inventive, and sensually textured, these are poems at once passionate and analytical, descriptive and meditative, lyrical and complex—poems that keep one eye on the moon while leveling their gaze at the self and its immediate world.

From "Out of the West"

Out of the west, unexpected, lyric,
a stand of yellow irises
rises from the pond muck.


Two horses graze the field,
one limping from the fire they fled.

Matter and spirit meet, love,
argue, wherever you rest your eyes,
on microscopic midges, horseflies.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

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.