White Sea: Poems

Cleopatra Mathis' poems have long been known for their richness of image and sound, and in White Sea the language is as generous as ever. But in this new work the target of the poet's vision is more jagged and elusive. Struggling to find a voice in the face of the death of a close friend and the threatened loss of others, she doubts the adequacy of language and the consolations of nature.
Constructing her own eschatology, Mathis embarks upon a crucial confrontation with last things, one that questions the beginnings of her identity as a Greek child in Louisiana and carries forward into the landscape of the outer shore of Cape Cod. What she sees and cannot see governs these poems. Everywhere, the poet is haunted by the unrealized and unknowable soul.