Constance Studer

Mellen Poetry Press, 1996, 2004.

"Each poem in Prayer To A Purple God resonates in primal intensity and regard. Each poem focuses on a health emergency, the body's vulnerability, the acts of doctors and nurses, and the vivid inner perceptions of those involved. Simultaneously, astonishingly, all are painted in terms of larger contexts and presences of earth. In the critical care unit, one patient is half woman and half bird, one crawls across the glass in an aquarium like a snail, one has a torch in his skull, one has a physician illuminate "her arteries and shelves/of bone in a ruby gloom, one is held/within white-curved wings." Though grounded in the profound struggles and emotions of the hospital, many of these poems are reminiscent of Neruda's odes in how they focus and yet open through metaphor and association. This is one powerful, compassionate and unique book of poems."