Barbara Loots, one of America’s best light verse poets for several decades, shows us her more reflective side in Windshift. Both her meditative poems and her witty poems display craft, love of music in language, and a deep understanding of human frailties and aspirations.
—A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze and Slander, and Richard Wilbur Award winner for The Secret Life of Women
True to Barbara Loots’s past as a star writer for Hallmark Cards, her terrific new collection has poems for every mood. Want something contemplative? “Relativity” and “Shoreline” are just the thing. Prefer hilarious? “Colonoscopy: A Love Poem” and “The Aisle Not Taken” will get you giggling. Loots also does no-nonsense (“Obituary”), rueful (“At Fifty”), snarky (“Antisocial Network”), hopeful (“The Healing”), and much more. Uniting her work is a sharp eye and even sharper wit. Spider webs, in her telling, become “harps of white hair.” A run-over pedestrian is “deleted quick as pornographic spam,” while a caterpillar thrives in six exquisite lines: “In perfect proclamation/ that piety will do/ it shrugged its fur, / it shed its house, / it fasted/ and it flew.” To paraphrase Hallmark’s old slogan, when you care enough to read the very best, read Loots.
—Melissa Balmain, Able Muse Book Award Winner for Walking in on People
Barbara Loots’s new collection, Windshift, continues the journey begun in Road Trip, passing through topics from the cosmos to the caterpillar. This accomplished formalist has mastered the art of the profound but accessible lyric. Beginning with poems written on an island, the fresh winds of wit, intellect, and spirit blow throughout the pages. Her work often engages with problems of faith in a modern world, and is an excellent guide to the “faithfulness we may achieve / by learning what to unbelieve.”
—Gail White, author of CATechism, Asperity Street, and two-time winner and judge of the Nemerov Sonnet Competition
Hundreds of verses into her career as a writer for Hallmark Cards, Barbara Loots remained essentially anonymous. However, her optimistic view of life touched thousands of lives with a broad swath of social communications, from birthdays to holidays to care of the grieving. She is the author of a number of children’s books published by Hallmark, including Fun on the Farm With Numbers, now in the Smithsonian collection of pop-up books.
Her work as a poet has been appearing since the 1960s in magazines such as The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, New Letters, Measure, Cricket, and The Christian Century. Anthologies include The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, The Helicon Nine Reader, The Muse Strikes Back, The Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers, and Landscapes With Women. Online, her poems can be found at Mezzo Cammin and Light Poetry Magazine. Her chapbooks are The Bride’s Mirror Speaks and Sibyl & Sphinx (with Gail White). Her collection Road Trip was published by Kelsay Books / White Violet Press in 2014.
In the formalist tradition, she writes with admiration for such poets as Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She resides in Kansas City, Missouri, where she volunteers as a Docent for the renowned Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and worships with the Presbyterians at Second Church. She is married to Bill Dickinson and obeys orders from Bob the Cat.
