Carol Masters

Dear Descendent Carol Masters

In Dear Descendent, Carol Masters draws upon her life as an activist and her love of the natural world to fashion thoughtful overlays and wry juxtapositions that can delight the senses or prick the conscience-often both. A master of metaphor, yet she doesn't shy away from an occasional grand (and whimsical) metaphysical statement: Everything is Made of Everything. There are prison cells and fields of flowers-even her straightforward descriptions of the moon demonstrate that something new and evocative can still be found in its age-old countenance. Gratitude and grief commingle in her poems about aging and loved ones lost. Topping it all off is an intermittently surreal and sometimes almost crazy freedom in the use of images. In the poem " Fly Ball," for example, sports, physics, and the Second Coming converge as the sacrifice fly approaches the mitt. (Apollinaire would have approved.) The words flow freely, musically, from the page, ensuring that Masters' voice is one that her descendents--and ours-will want to listen to.