Complementary Colors - Susan Robinson

Embracing imagination that sees inside and outside -- moments within time, worlds within words --- Susan Robinson’s poems transform sights, sounds and movements into mental images and collages that quietly surprise and astound. Luckily for us, Susan shares these opportunities in her newly released book of poetry, Complementary Colors. With ingenuity and humor, the poems land us with ways to see that there is pageantry in our everyday lives.

An excerpt from the title poem, Complementary Colors:

….Let’s say we strive for passion

We haven’t said that, just suggesting.

Smear turquoise next to peach,

Not in a come-by way, sideways and modest,

But leaning hard with feeling,

The flagrant ache of a kissing bruise.

Now plop orange on the plummy edge,

You may blush to watch the colors

stir, duck, buckle and merge….”

Robinson’s poetry takes us from the edge of roadways, to the magician’s hat, to the deconstruction of a county fair, and to a place setting at her family’s Sunday dining table in Tennessee. We fly with her imagination to awakening at daybreak in Assisi with swallows soaring and bells ringing, and onto New Grange, Ireland, to reckon with the everlasting human need to say “we live.” Many of the poems are located in quiet and quick places of energy on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in West Marin, California.

Some spring from places usually unattended or unattentioned: a mound in the yard where someone abandoned an extension cord (Gophers are Eating our Kilowatts), a dump pit at the recycling/composting yard. Here you will meet Grasshopper, a cheeky insect who hitches a free ride to a new home among the roses by the driveway.

.... I fell for a face at the dump—

for his moving mandible, really.

Staring at me straight, mouthing something.

He wasn’t begging, just assumed a “yes.”

The stranger was, I knew, a chewer,

but his pale green grin was friendly.

On the spot, our eyes shook hands,

him clinging to the windshield

in a surfer pose….

REVIEWS

Today I opened your poetry book and ended up reading through the whole book as you would through a novel. I find it, as you titled it, full of many moods, many colors. Thanking you for sharing your poetry with its intimacy and honesty…I loved the illustrations too! (Pam F.)

When I started reading last week, I quickly gave up trying to choose a favorite…Instead I let each poem take me to wherever it led. Some produced a chuckle, others a tear, and all brought memories of their own. (Jo F.)

In heaven…thats where I am, reading your poems, each one a different kind of treat but so related by your voice, the eye (mit glint), the thickets of time. (Janet C.)

From the title poem on, I have enjoyed every piece I can feel your bright spirit in every stanza and verse. (Marty R.)

You’re in for delight and enlightenment with this new volume of poetry!

~ Coastal Art Works, Publisher