The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

There is much of wonder in a first book of poems: a new voice, a freshness, other ways of being and believing. And so it is with Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s The Marriage of the Moon and the Field. There are marvelous poems here, poems that range through the world: Vienna, Juarez, Andalusia, Mozambique, Venice. The poet tells us

I’ve looked into the world and found
my own life reassembled and given back to me
with broken glass and a birdsong.

There are poems of family (parents, children, grandparents), our primal world, and there are poems of immigrants, asylum seekers, the displaced. And weaving through all of them there is a sweet charity, a belief in grace, and a tenderness toward existence. There is as well a recognition that tragedy and loss make up a part of our lives, but in Wilkinson’s vision these can be redeemed since “we’re verses with a space in between/for our own small hallelujah.” These are poems that “you can ride…into tomorrow.” Sunni Wilkinson is a welcome new poet for our times.

– Joseph Stroud

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poems sustain a compelling tension between the macro and micro worlds. Scientific facts of the physical realm collide with intimate interiorities. She turns a steely eye and a tender heart toward the experience of living fully in the rush of the NOW and the flickering echoes of what came before. These are lushly rendered poems to savor and/or to devour.

-Nance Van Winckel

The poems in Sunni Wilkinson’s The Marriage of the Moon and the Field show us history, affection, private struggle, and the common life with a kind of grave, irony-tinged happiness that is rare in the poetry of our time. Her poems turn away from complaint, as though she had set out to reveal instead the domestic life of intelligence in all its color, warmth, and depth. This is a very fine debut volume, worth treasuring; and more are sure to follow.

– Christopher Howell