Shirley's Current Work: Dark Familiar <br>
"I read Aleda Shirley's Dark Familiar for the first time with the usual cautionary doubts, and the second time with a specific unease, then the third time with pleasure. Shirley is an invasive poet and when you feel you're on the verge of the expected she surprises you. Dark Familiar is, simply enough, fine work."
--Jim Harrison

"Dark Familiar paints a world of riddled colors, black-jacked, blue-mooned, violated magic, silvered phantoms, gothic shades. It is a book for the living, of the living, shot through with intimations of mortality, what Shirley calls the "customary" mysticisms that surround the body's finity and frailty, the heart's febrile, thumping hope, the imagination's darker power to resurrect.

Aleda Shirley is a feline writer, stealthy and carnal and lush. In her first collection in nearly a decade, Shirley has staked her claims, the familiar, deeply human ones: that emptiness is permanent, that hope is tenuous, that connection is infinite, but that the body is exact in danger, prone to back luck and to miracle-and all within that brutal, brave phenomenom where one is settling the debt of one's terrestrial accounts. These narratives are harrowing, and hallowed, striking, dark, familiar, strange, and beautiful, and wise."
--Lucie Brock-Broido<br><br>
Review of Dark Familiar from Publishers Weekly <br>
Shirley's third book her first in the decade since Long Distance (1996) fuses the everyday and the otherworldly with mystifying precision. Haunted by dead friends and lost lovers, the speakers of these 28 neatly cast poems seek to grieve and make myths of the past in the vain hope of filling the spaces loss has left: "It didn't occur/ to me the emptiness would be permanent." Straightforward language tinged with surprising words ("...the view from our room of a meadow,/ dazzling & lacustral") and obsessively intense observations of nature ("...rhododendron leaves rattle their shredded gold") lends the poems a mournful, trancelike music. References to ancient Greek mythology provide stunning figures for the contemporary world: "...no one warned me about the countless/ tributaries of the Styx that skein through a life." What little hope there is derives from what small measures of control these speakers can exercise: "Bequeathed nothing by you,/ I must again begin saving or live less dearly." While the continual resifting of this material does reveal the secrets to some of its magic, Shirley has nonetheless crafted a powerful return to poetry. (May)
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REVIEW BY LIBRARY JOURNAL, APRIL 15, 2006

Library Journal, April 15, 2006

Shirley, Aleda. Dark Familiar. Sarabande, dist. by Consortium. May 2006.
c.88p. ISBN 1-932511-35-0. $21.95; pap. ISBN 1-932511-36-9. $13.95.
POETRY

A quick glance at the table of contents points to Shirley (Long Distance)as a writer with a painter's eye for color, shade, and detail. But her titles only hint at her tremendous skill with imagery. In an early poem, she juxtaposes April 15, taxes, and the anniversary of Henry James's death.

Such antics might seem reminiscent of the surrealists' description of art as "a chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table," but unlike the surrealists, Shirley creates poems that are down to earth, her associations at once jarring and rational. However deeply the poems delve into relationships, secrets, and betrayals, everything seems presented at face value, with no undue emotions clouding the words.

Many poems are concerned with death but depict the human intertwined with nature and carrying its own sense of renewal (the dead and the living easily change places: "after I dream of you I can spend all day planning/ how to respond the next time we speak"). Shirley uses craft and consistency, usually working in tight, three-line stanzas, to act as a container for disparate images. The result is recommended for all comprehensive poetry collections.

-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York