These poems, embossed with Bass’ covetable signature, play like snippets of cinema from merely every woman’s life story–moments awed by and blissfully tangled with a lover, contemplating the unrelenting hurtle of time, aging with an awkward but fiercely determined grace. Indigo is our soundtrack, finally–and its addictive and merciless music is not an option.

Indigo proves what tried and true poetry readers have always known about the living legend Ellen Bass.  These poems court the harsh realities of life with a power that suggests we can indeed overcome these realities. And the whole of this book is the testament of one who survives, but also of one who takes responsibility for whatever the cost of that survival may be:  ‘The first time you see the sun/you’re splayed on your back, the shadow/of my blade above you.’ What I love most about this book is its subtleties, the ways it plants in any reader the need to turn the page, to know more even if it means more heartbreak.  You hold in your hands the work of a sorceress at the height of her powers.

‘You may have to break/ your heart,’ writes Ellen Bass, ‘but it isn’t nothing/ to know even one moment alive.’ That complex tenant of faith underlies every poem in this superb book, an inquiry into what it is to be present in the physical world,  in time, a body in the world of bodies. Bass’s poems are surprising, tender, hungry and wide awake,  fearless in their attention to every nuance of feeling. When a young father pushes a stroller down the street, ‘tattooed from knuckle to jaw,’ she finds a figure for her own work, and names her vocation; the inked man ‘wanted/ to be in a body . . . wanted it so much/ that he marked it up like a book, underlining, /highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.’ I love this book wholeheartedly.