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Love and its inter-twinings of the spiritual and the sexual remains the eternal and compelling subject of poetry. Barbara Blatner bravely takes it on in LIVING WITH YOU, a candid and searching account of the first year of the poet's marriage. Both joy and pain travel as lightning flashes through these intense, simply worded lyrics. The beauties of the natural world appear as themselves—a moonlit night, a November landscape—but also as symbolic reflections of her poet's struggle to find union with the husband/lover yet keep her independent identity: "How do I / get closer to you / and not fall under?" She speaks as an heir to H.D. and William Carlos Williams in a vibrant and highly engaging twentieth-first century voice. Listen to her.
—Jane Augustine
author of A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing
Barbara Blatner's work possesses great power and great stillness. It is quiet but passionate, and the sense I have is that the processes she describes go on forever: "so we come back to / the old / the new // like the cats / in circle of[…]" She is very much a necessary poet in these loud and selfish times.
—Mac Wellman
LIVING WITH YOU is a love poem that slowly unrolls its intense moments in a sequence of lovemaking poems, morning, noon and night. You will be caught up in the poem's rhythms and carried along to "spaces everywhere / between."
—Bill Corbett
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