Fanatic Heart

Poems that give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized. 

Deborah Pope’s poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized, whose very personal visions yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry’s fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope’s skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given.
 

“"In Deborah Pope's poems open spaces are populated with light; a familiar landscape looked at closely and freshly becomes the sum of unsuspectedly rich, even sumptuous, parts. It's a rare joy to read a poet whose command of sensuous language is equal to her passionate love of the physical world."”

“Deborah Pope writes there is ‘salt in my kiss.’ Her poems have that kind of bite and are welcome because of it. She is intimate and wry and brassy in poems that wonderfully explore the hurts humans fall to—but a fine and positive hunger for life’s intensities energizes her songs. . . . Fanatic Heart is deft and true and exciting work.” Dave Smith
“In Deborah Pope’s poems open spaces are populated with light; a familiar landscape looked at closely and freshly becomes the sum of unsuspectedly rich, even sumptuous, parts. It’s a rare joy to read a poet whose command of sensuous language is equal to her passionate love of the physical world.” Lisel Mueller
“I am astonished by the intensity of these poems, by their sensuousness and precision, by their ability to catch the elusive weathers of marriage and family, by the rediscoveries of value beyond the clutter of experience. These are poems of family in the largest sense, and of lives. It is because we have all felt the need to start over, so many times, and the need to return, that they speak to us.” Robert Morgan

Deborah Pope has published four books of poetry--Fanatic Heart, Mortal World, Falling Out of the Sky, and Take Nothing. Her collection, Fanatic Heart, was re-issued in the Classic Contemporary Series from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, EPOCH, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poetry Northwest. She has also been awarded the Robinson Jeffers Prize.

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