Pacing the Moon

In Pacing the Moon, Sandy Green demonstrates time and again that everything tells a story. In a poem titled “The Iron,” for example, a missing iron is not just a missing iron. It’s everything that left the relationship when the narrator’s lover took off: order, stability, what should have been permanence–but also the occasional bump in the road or intentional crease. By way of contrast, in “Pouring Tea by Way of Titration,” a shared pot of tea speaks to the minutia of shared memory that holds the most intimate of relationships together. As this pair of poems demonstrates, the collection also does a wonderful job of balancing the extremes that make a life: presence and absence, order and chaos, longing and satisfaction are all the subjects of Green’s poetry. Indeed, so schooled is she at the cosmology of everyday life that the most mundane of occurrences (dust settling on a porcelain cat, for example) serve as the backdrop for the most significant of realizations (time passes, life is not eternal, and, thus, we must learn to live in the moment, to appreciate the now). Weighing in at sixteen poems over twenty-one pages, Pacing the Moon packs a surprising punch and introduces Sandy Green not just as a poet but an ardent student of the tiny details that make us human.