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The Last Girl by Rose Solari

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 68 pgs.
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The Last Girl by Rose Solari has a dream-like, otherworldly quality as the poems move from past to present, reality to dreams, memory to heartache. Setting the stage is “Tree House of the Dream Child,” in which we are gathered up to see a tree house that was build long ago by unknown persons but if we’re stealthy enough and believe in the unseen, we can receive a visit from the “dream child.” In this poem, elements are conspiring, the world is wild, and as readers, we are entering Solari’s world where Persephone comes back to earth as a father leaves it.

In “Math and the Garden,” Solari captures grief in a way that few can articulate – through those moments when parents try to impart advice to children who are half-listening, half-dreaming. A tough task depending on the age of the child, but even as adults, we tend to half-listen to our parents.

In “Another Shore,” we experience imagination first hand when apples become part of a schoolroom and a pan of mud becomes quicksand for another adventure. There are prayers and dreams, and day-dreaming throughout the poems as Solari explores the what-ifs of alternative life paths and relationships — the “other” lives we could have led. “You could always//come back. Those are the breaks, your mother would say/if she heard you now, and she’d be right.” (From “Somewhere Between Four and Five A.M.”, pg. 40-1)

There is a deep mourning in The Last Girl by Rose Solari, but there’s also the breath of imagination and memory, a reveling in the past and the what could have been. Delve into this dream-like exploration of loss and imagination, visit island paradises, abandoned tree houses, and so much more.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Rose Solari is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, The Last Girl, Orpheus in the Park, and Difficult Weather; the one-act play, Looking for Guenevere, in which she also performed; and a novel, A Secret Woman. She has lectured and taught writing workshops at many institutions, including Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing; the University of Maryland, College Park; St. John’s College, Annapolis; the Jung Society of Washington; and The Centre for Creative Writing at Oxford University’s Kellogg College.

Mailbox Monday #731

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

The Last Girl by Rose Solari, which I purchased at Kensington Day of the Book festival.

A shimmering girl who disappears in daylight. A boy who goes to war and comes back forever broken. New landscapes in which old ghosts appear, telling their bits of stories. Lovers and losses, visions and dreams—such are the people, places, and images who fill Rose Solari’s third collection of poetry, The Last Girl. Moving beyond the often-narrative constructions of her previous collection, the poems in this collection tell their truths slant-wise, in spiky, inventive lines that sing their way under the reader’s skin. Solari’s whole-hearted lyricism of her elegiac moments, linguistic inventiveness, and range of tones sweep the reader from dark to light, from pain to joy, from unbearable loss to giddy delight. The poems in this collection represent a writer working at the peak of her powers, possessed of technical mastery, fierce perception, and a tender but unsentimental heart.

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova, which I purchased at Kensington Day of the Book festival.

The poems in this volume explore the experiences of love and loss; of motherhood and childhood; and of living between the two cultures of America and Bulgaria.

What did you receive?