Sophie Cabot Black

Sophie Cabot Black Poems

Sophie Cabot Black Biography

Raised on a small New England farm, poet Sophie Cabot Black received a BA from Marlboro College and an MFA from Columbia University. Black’s collections of poetry include The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and The Descent (2004), which won the Connecticut Book Award. Black’s lyrical poems are both revelatory and elusive, exploring a landscape sharpened with grief and devotion. As a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review noted, “Sophie Cabot Black . . . is absolutely direct and absolutely removed—a strange confluence of tones that is both intellectually provocative and deeply moving." Black’s poetry has been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (2005). Her essays have been included in Wanting a Child (1998). Her honors include the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s John Masefield Memorial Award, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She lives in New York City and Wilton, Connecticut.)

The Best Poem Of Sophie Cabot Black

Bird at the Window

Beyond is a brightness
I am not equal to

Yet what I see
Turns into what I want,

And to bring nothing but this body
To pass through

The one thing between
Myself and what I crave,

Almost done, the world a ruin
Of leaves, winter at the throat,

My song over and over until
So familiar I can do

What I am about to do
While you who rise from the table

And walk from room to room
Will remember only the sound

Of what cast herself through
All that glass, instead of the song

That was sung until finally
You would ask to know more.

Sophie Cabot Black Comments