So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems

“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.
Carol Moldaw is the author of a novel, The Widening, and four books of poetry—The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize; Through the Window; Chalkmarks on Stone; and Taken from the River. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize.