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by This is a beautiful
book of poetry: spare, ascetic, searching, waiting, discovering.
Pauletta is a poet whom we need to hear. In Divining, Pauletta Hansel searches for living water in the harsh and rocky places of her life, and she finds it in abundance. Whether exploring difficult childhoods - her mother's and her own - the pain of living single, or the experience of sitting with a friend dying of AIDS, Hansel calls up deep and healing words to sustain her journey - and ours. - George Ella Lyon, author of Catalpa and With a Hammer for My Heart
This is a book of words - hard and soft, round and jagged - that do what good and simple words do: make beautiful things like these poems. Each poem here divines by means of unerringly right words that find the poet's and our own experiences - words which let those experiences lead them, the way water draws a forked stick in the hands of a true diviner. Pauletta Hansel is a genuine diviner of the meanings hidden beneath the ground of our daily lives. -Murray Bodo, author of Poetry as Prayer: Denise Levertov
The poems [in Divining] contemplate life from a sober hard-headed realism. Admirably, they rarely resolve the tensions and conflicts at their centers - they realize, and continue to love, the fallen world we have been given. They are a record, restrained, keeping their own distance, of the soul of their writer. We witness in them an honesty and forthrightness and candor which, perhaps, only poetry can bring us so briefly yet so powerfully. Most importantly, they remind us of the habits of heart and spirit without which our own souls might perish. -From the Foreward by Richard Hague, author of Milltown Natural and Ripening.
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