Rivendell
Introduction to Emerging Poets Contest
Gerry LaFeminaSara Talpos studied with me at the Far Field Retreat for Writers in 2001. She had just graduated from the University of Michigan and her poems were well-tailored, sweeping down the page and across the line with a cadence that was both eloquent and savvy, musically aware, technically refined. She is a meditative poet-balancing the competing tendencies of narrative and lyricism so that the poems have a story but the story is a means to an end, not the end itself: it's in the lyric moments, those lines in her poems when the images blossom and reverberate, the power and pathos of her poems is found. In the years since, I've often seen many of Sara's poems, and felt that they were the poems of the real deal-a poet maturing into her vision and voice. We can see this in the winning poem, and surely in the body of her work. I couldn't think of another young poet I know more deserving of this honor.
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