The White Ibis
Laura Eklund
ISBN 978-0-9625306-7-8
83 pages
Hardcover-Poetry
Price: $24.95 - Limited availability
October 2012
The compelling and distinctive voice of Laura Eklund is vividly captured in this collection of selected poems that reveal all the stylized beauty of her unique persona captured on page. More than simply personal expression, The White Ibis embodies from beginning to end Eklund’s inner desire for oneness with all things. Her poems are often a calling to merge with nature, with all things exterior to the self, imbued and intersected by multiple conceptual elements of being. Their emotional consistency and the directness of her search for experiential wholeness are touchstones throughout her work, always focused, always sensual, showing the force of an inner life continuously seeking marriage with all things. In perpetual states of passion and feeling in search of self-realization, her body is often the conduit to knowing and knowledge, desire and its fulfillment, pleasure and its realization, her poems revealing a highly perceptual core of desire seeking recognition and connection to new desire. Brilliant and unique in their evocation of nature, The White Ibis charts profound, abstract dimensions of being in constant transformation, always affirming love and her deepest affinities to the world.
Misfit Magazine
Laura Eklund is an early-in-her-career poet of great promise instead of a later-in-life accomplished poet. Basically, the book is divided into two distinct sections. The first is a compilation of personal, daily lifestyle poems mixed with the more abstract poems that she so successfully wrote in her later collection, Song of Lisbon. These earlier poems feel more formative than the later ones, but still show the sensitive and painterly eye, an astute sense of form that blends words and image in often startling, unique ways. The second section, “Forgetting the Face of Leaves,” is a love song for her beloved husband George. Anyone who appreciates sincere, heartfelt writing for a spouse could not help but relate to these poems.