A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln
by Eve Wood
Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99
Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles – that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.
If you’re seeking to recalibrate your own internal compass on what it means to be a ‘good person’ or, conversely, are in search of sound template for our next generation of elected leaders, A Cadence for Redemption is a singular point of onset, for its terrains are of the highest bearings, its lyricism of heartsome beauty, its imagination of distinct wonder. It is, in other words, an altogether fine book of poetry for this fraught moment of our now. – C von Hassett
Below are three excerpts from A Cadence for Redemption, courtesy of Eve Wood.
