Prisoner of the Swifts (Press Release) (186 KB)

Prisoner of the Swifts by Judith Skillman

This collection treats themes of birth, creation, cosmology, and mortality with the lyricism and depth readers have come to expect from Skillman. Four sections weave a delicate tapestry, that of pedestrian lives overlaid and informed by the acrobatic flight of swifts.

“Like Dickinson, another poet whose passionate imagination ‘overflowed / the room’ to embrace the whole universe, Skillman watches the aerial acrobatics of never-alighting swifts beyond her ‘Victorian walls,’ and discovers in them the strength of spirit to confront her own frailty and to celebrate a life ‘that seeds and recedes.’ These poems ‘render in iridescence’ the mortal lives, with their windows onto eternity, of us all.”

—Carolyne Wright

“These poems start from a well-stocked base of knowing what can be known—flowers, stars, children, illness and suffering, the vicissitudes of aging—and cross boundaries into the unknown, the story-behind-the story, ‘the collage of past and present,’ the territory of the Mysteries. They ask questions of life and find some shadowy, but none-the-less real, movement toward answers in the metaphysics of these perfectly executed poems.”

—Judith Roche

“Skillman is expert in resizing the modest to meet the expectations of readers hoping to see the outlines of larger things. Her expansive imagination squares with insight, and in the end both seem aspects of a single unified sensibility.”

—David Rigsbee, The Cortand Review

“You will feel fortunate to have spent these hours...with a poet who knows every trick in the book yet never lets on that she’s doing anything other than saying what’s in her heart...”

—from David Kirby’s preface to Heat Lightning:
New & Selected Poems 1986 - 2006