The Sauntering Eye: Kansas Meditations and other titles

The Sauntering Eye: Kansas Meditations. By Elizabeth Schultz. FutureCycle Press, 2014. 101 pages. $15.95/paperback; $2.99/eBook.

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Mrs. Noah Takes the Helm. By Elizabeth Schultz. Turning Point Publications, 2014. 89 pages. $19/paperback.

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The Quickening. By Elizabeth Schultz. Antrim House, 2014. 25 pages. $13/paperback.

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When life hands you poetry, write poems. Although Elizabeth Schultz did not plan for three books of her poems to come out in the same year, it worked out that way: these three volumes, released by three different publishers, took years to create but came out practically all at once. And yet they are different from each other. Poems often ask the reader to slow down and become sensitive to the rhythm and flex of language. In The Sauntering Eye, Schultz sees the Kansas landscape as a rich, multi-layered place, and hopes readers of these meditations will see the landscape wherever they are with depth and meaning—with a “sauntering eye,” as Henry David Thoreau recommended and Schultz echoes.

The poems in Mrs. Noah Takes the Helm are told some from the point of view of Mrs. Noah in first person and some in third person as the reader watches her in action. The focus is on animals and Mrs. Noah’s care of them; we see her intervening in quarrels, maintaining order, understanding their needs, and being the presence of kindness and attention on the ark. She even delivers an elegy for earthworms. What ark doesn’t need that kind of skill?

Quickening, as in coming to life, is the theme of the final volume of poems on the stages of life. Though they may be universal, the stages of life are also personal, and Schultz shares her memories in a frank rendering of certain moments in her own life. Coming alive sometimes means beginning new stages, and that can be painful. These poems show a willingness to reveal, and to heal.