Child in the Road

CHILD IN THE ROAD is a mother's response to the sudden death of her young daughter., a rendering of the wide range of emotions experienced afterwards--not description, but an expression of grief from its center. The poems pull vivid imagery from the deepest layers of the unconscious, postcards from a sleepwalker unable to find rest, waking again and again in the wrong story. Who is alive and who is dead? What does it mean to go on living, "eyes searching / under the earth"?

With a rare combination of intensity fused to grace, the poems in Cindy Savett's first collection, CHILD IN THE ROAD, feel as if they might have been written by a sailor who walked the plank and disappeared into the depths. The poems care nothing for the events or ordinary logic of life on land. They never come up for air¬ and don't seem to have to. It is as if Savett created each line with an extraordinary lung capacity, so that her poetry can live at the bottom of the ocean of the unconscious -enabling us to live there, too. . . . The poems shape a brilliant coral reef discovered in the waters of a turbulent dream. -Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems.

I read CHILD IN THE ROAD as one long poem, lyric, meditative, wheeling, fierce; for all its richness of language, it seems to be reaching for some place beyond language, from which to mourn the death of a young child.-Jean Valentine, author of The Cradle of the Real Life and the 2004 National Book Award winner, Door in the Mountain.

CINDY SAVETT teaches poetry workshops at mental institutions in the Philadelphia area and has published her poetry in a wide variety of journals. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Merion, Pennsylvania, with her husband and children.