Some Help from the Dead - Paperback

by Ally Acker (Author)

One critic said about Some Help From the Dead, "These are flawless poems, poems I like as much as any of W.S. Merwin's poems (at his best)." In this, her third collection, Ally Acker continues her fascination with how the familiar proves to be mysterious, how the present, past and future all to merge as our lives progress. As Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, the art of losing isn t hard to master. And so with her ear tuned to the ground, garnering wisdom from those who have passed, Acker listens for the lyrical cadences of nature on what is lost, and found again.The mundane becomes surreal (as in The Window, where "the photographs are where / the building once was: / Cows, mountains, streams. / But her landlord will do nothing...", and in her extraordinarily inventive interpretations of the paintings by the Surrealist, Remedios Varo), and the surreal transmutes into the quotidian. What arises is a miraculous resonance in the everyday, and a poetry that celebrates the living.

Author Biography

Ally Acker is a New York filmmaker, writer, and Buddhist. She is the director of eleven feature documentaries, an interactive CD-ROM hosted by Jodie Foster, and the author of Reel Women, as well as two books of poetry. She is the winner of the Laurel Entertainment Prize (for The Mathematical Mermaid), the Los Angeles Women in Film/Annenberg Scholarship for excellence in screenwriting, the Chester H. Jones Foundation Award, and the Carl Sandburg Centennial Contest. She also maintains www.reelwomen.com.