Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Beckian Fritz Goldberg is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, including Never Be the Horse, winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize; Twentieth Century Children, winner of the Indiana Review Chapbook Prize; and Lie Awake Lake, winner of the Field Poetry Prize. Goldberg has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize from Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Poets of the ’90s, Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Gulf Coast, Plume, and others. She currently lives in Oxnard, California, with her two cats.

The Blue Eye of Earth

Poems

By Beckian Fritz Goldberg

In her first collection in a decade, Beckian Fritz Goldberg returns with The Blue Eye of Earth, her tour de force of luminous, meditative poems that measure a secret distance between person and cosmos, memory and desire, beauty and grief. Whether standing at her neighbor’s fence of desert oleander, or birdwatching with her mother, or flipping through late-night TV, or going out to watch the moon again, Fritz Goldberg never fails to attend the romance of a world we are sure to lose. This is a lyricist unafraid of the ordinary predicament of the night sky, a place where historical figures, scientific inquiry, and encounters with strangers are imagined with intimacy and music, and where the orphic questions are answered by a glance back. Through precise imagery and philosophical reach, these poems pursue what it means to inhabit a mortal body on a threatened planet while still finding moments of wonder, connection, and astonishment. In The Blue Eye of Earth, Beckian Fritz Goldberg offers her sublime, compassionate hymnal to the enduring mysteries of love, consciousness, and mortal time.