Carol Sadtler reviews
Get Up Said the World
by Gail Goepfert

How do we persist in this living? poses Gail Goepfert in her full-length collection, Get Up Said the World. In it, she commits to wrestle/truth/loose, muscle into what matters. The poems combine the experience of a clear-eyed, unflinching Midwesterner with a sensibility and poetic skills reminiscent of the English Romantic poets. For example, in “Flight,”  

a tiny sparrow 
shuttles tissue 
to quilt its nest 
leaving me 
to speculate
about souls rising
on a breath of wind

… 

if dying 
might be 
that simple
that swift

There is a will in these poems to gather light/coming and going. Opposite each poem is a page with one or two words in bold type, a label, along with a dictionary definition: dogged, revivify, luminosity, onus, cast about. To tap and make meaning of the life force is the artist’s work. As Goepfert quotes Keats in the poem “What Keats Knew,” labeled élan vital, The poetry/of the earth is never dead.

With intimate, sensuous details, Goepfert draws the reader in. As the speaker’s grandfather declines, she describes stroking his hand in “Elegy for a Coal Miner,” dry, hard/like the binding of an old book. Elsewhere, in “Drinking It In,” ecstasy on a sunporch calls us to Witness! The alchemy of eye to eye, rib to rib, thigh to mine.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure is Goepfert’s respectful tenderness for the web of connection that is our world. In “Two open mouths,” a carp at the water’s surface represents her own desires:

Mouth open and wanting. 
Teetering
on the thin lip
of the world.

Gail Goepfert, associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet and photographer.  She has three book publications—A Mind on Pain (2015), Tapping Roots (2018), and Get Up, Said the World (2020) from Červená Barva Press. Recent publications include One Art, The Night Heron Barks, and Inflectionist Review.  More at gailgoepfert.com

Carol Sadtler is a poet, writer and editor whose recent poems and reviews appear in The Humanist, RHINO Poetry, Bangalore Review, Sky Island Journal, Pacific Review and other publications. She lives in Chicago with her family.