The Blue Darter

The poems in Keven Bellows' latest collection, The Blue Darter, are consistently profound and surprising, highly visual and honest, full of grace and pain and humor. Wonderful! Anne Lamott Keven Bellows' exquisite sequence of elegies, The Blue Darter, emerges also as a chronicle of a charmed courtship, a powerful portrait of a marriage, and a clear-eyed reckoning with the final stages of unrelenting illness. Her husband, the famed and incomparable newspaper editor Jim Bellows, is reflected with his brilliance and wit in full glory, and his passion for the world-and for his wife--the envy of us all. There are few poetic records of human passage that so skillfully recount the sifts of the mind and the body in aging with such little sentimentality and with such a lyric courage. Just as only the very finest elegies allow us to experience the devastation of loss alongside the daily triumph of a life, The Blue Darter returns us--with a renewed sense of hope and possibility--to our own worried lives. David St. John