Poetry. Sarah White is all that a good poet should be--smart, funny, daring. She redefines the familiar, giving new aspects to themes as commonplace as love and motherhood, standing beside her son in a courthouse, or advising her children that, as a poet, she has other work to do. Following her, we end up in unexpected places, in the graveyard where Baudelaire is buried, or in Purgatory itself, ...an island in the Southern Sea, where sin can be handled, deftly. You go with her through poems that assume their own heft and place on the page--'I can step next door / to see Vesuvian flames / and hear the roar, ' confident she'll not leave you stranded, even as she quips, 'I tip to one side when I walk.'--Mervyn Taylor We can tell, from these lines and the ones in between, how much our poet loves language, over and beside all other loves in her life; and we can tell that--sh..! --she's having an affair with Occitan. Somehow I find it entirely justified, for just as those modern Occitan poets are avatars of the medieval troubadours and their amor de lonh, Sarah White is a paradigm of the modern trobairitz.--Ricardo Nirenberg

"What six words best describe the author of Sarah White's new memoir, THE POEM HAS REASONS: A STORY OF FAR LOVE? Daughter. Mother. Artist. Poet. Professor. Translator. Write a sestina using those six words, translate it into Old French, and you'll have a glimpse into this remarkable woman's remarkable life."--J.R. Solonche Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid. Poetry. Memoir.

Poetry. "War poems are variously full of anger, bitter irony, gore, and fervent protest that the poet already knows is futile. Such tonalities lie just beyond the outworks of Sarah White's poems in WARS DON'T HAPPEN ANYMORE and sometimes invade them. But at the center of these poems is a resonant core of grief and loss brilliantly modulated simple elegy, the brilliant hues of vainglory, the taste of blood and iron in exotic colonies, the symphonic folly of imperial gallantry, the gorgeous flare of destruction, the endless misreading of history, the disfigurement of mind and body in short the sorrows of war passed through a sensibility at once exquisite and capacious and one we sometimes almost wish did not remember so well." Eugene Garber "I've been reading your poems this cold, snowy afternoon. "Enjoy" is not the right word but I have been rapt and edified. WARS DON'T HAPPEN ANYMORE is a perfect title for a book that takes on the delusions, regrets, and brutal facts of war. Sarah White's poems testify to specific circumstances that charge each death or reprieve from death with a story or memory or image. She has not backed down from the pity we rarely let ourselves feel. Anyone whose life has been touched by war, which is to say everyone, should read these poems whose anguished occasions are so finely suspended in the terrible amber of time." Baron Wormser "In her new collection, Sarah White blends her prodigious poetic gifts with a deep knowledge of history and literature to produce a unique slant on the folly and losses of never-ending war, interwoven with a wise and rueful take on losses within a family. The poems are varied, imaginative, musical, and surprising, and one of the great pleasures of reading the collection is the consistency of the theme and haunting, touching echoes among the poems." Elizabeth Coleman"

Poetry. "Never in American letters, before ALICE AGES AND AGES, have we seen a thigh at once so elegant and portentous. Upon its surface a filigree of web-like veins empurpled, cerulean, blood-red, according to certain gradations of self-regard and fear. Where will we find its meaning? Deep-rooted in Alice's flesh? In its mirror image? Behind the looking glass in the specular world? If anyone knows, Sarah White does. Follow her words toward the heart of this spidery labyrinth. Stay always alert" Eugene Garber."

Poetry. "When a poem enlarges my world, I am happy. When a book is filled with one such poem after another, all singing on the page, I am joyful. In IRIDESCENT GUEST celebrating the spirit of art is personal, as when the poet reads Edward Lear while caring for her children, or remembers a hometown musician making her way to Sunday service, 'I grow as old as Old / Grace Greene / who learned by feel / each gravel curve...' I am grateful for this book and will hold it close for consolation, as I navigate the future."--Donna Hilbert "IRIDESCENT GUEST--stunning, glinting. Striding out of the ordinary, these poems shimmer morose and joyful, ominous and light-hearted. Sarah White surveys our perilous, our exquisite world with a solvent 'personhood' sans ego and pretense. The IRIDESCENT GUEST brings great self-knowledge to bear in her bouquet...presents no small effort of stretching and reaching to the limits in order to wreathe masterfully, both the consolation and the forlornness of our mortal coil. This guest pays homage to the art gods, the kitchen gods, and to the children--silver, mutable, delicate...solvent and sure."--Karen Garthe "Sarah White dedicates IRIDESCENT GUEST with affection and gratitude to the Muses and Makers around her and goes on to celebrate many of them by name in her poems. It's soon obvious to the reader that White has lived a rich and long life, shaped by art, music, literature, and philosophy. Many older poets write gloomily of their approaching deadline. Not White (although she does claim to hate the young blonde in the locker room 'that smells of envy and chlorine'). In her final section, "Beautiful Adieux," White warmly remembers loved ones lost but tells her kids, 'I mean to 'End,' / not to 'Pass.'' She'd like her ashes to evaporate, to fall as rain...'over the tombs of Dickinson and Beckett, / Rimbaud, Rembrandt, Manet, and Cassatt'--a final tribute to those who shaped her way of embracing the world with words. Certainly life shapes art, but for many people it's the other way around. When Sarah White says 'There is a wood / where the past is foretold, the future remembered,' we get a delicious shiver, realizing that here is a book that makes us feel that way, too."--Alarie Tennille

Poetry. "Sarah White's CLEOPATRA HAUNTS THE HUDSON is an eloquently moving recherche du temps perdu. History is a treasury of ghostly personages whom White brings back and vivifies for us, usually to tell the stories of their losses-Cleopatra, Keats, Moliere, Anne Frank, and many lesser known. Families and love affairs also bequeath haunted elegies. But memory is fragile. Poems that call out to the dead or missing are broken by contrary winds. Indeed, some of the very poetic forms that White deploys in her recollections are assailed by disuse-sestina, villanelle, sonnet-so that many poems must turn upon themselves, examine their own ability to hold the right words fast, must argue with themselves about rhyme and cadence"--Eugene K. Garber. White formerly taught in the Department of French and Italian at Franklin and Marshall College.