Stars Above, Stars Below

This reissue of Stars Above, Stars Below, originally published in 1984, will reacquaint readers with the early work of Margaret Hasse, one of that remarkable generation of women poets who came of age in the 1970s. Although Hasse was only 34 when the collection won the annual Minnesota Voices Project sponsored by New Rivers Press, its unique blend of lyric and narrative qualities already carried what Patricia Hampl recently referred to as " a rare 'old soul' authority." Readers approaching her work for the first time are in for a treat. Those who are familiar with her more recent books may recognize some of the same themes: delight in sensual experience, understanding of life's fragility, appreciation for the largess of memory, and rapt engagement with the natural world, especially the prairies and lakes of the Midwest. As Hasse writes in a poem about hiking alone and listening to bird song: The stiller she is the more everything speaks / in the immense vocabulary of being.