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There is magic in Connie Veenendaal’s poems. They have a crystal clarity while being far from obvious or simple. When she refers to Bohemian Waxwings as “migrants,” suddenly we are given both the beauty and the sorrow of our world. Again and again, she makes new connections, whether offering fresh glimpses into other artists or revealing the rich resonance in ordinary experience. There is a quiet authority here—great agility, subtle wit, and an unassuming learnedness. To say that they come from the pen of a working poet who is now 100 years old just adds more wonder to poems that are already brimming over with wonder.
—Betsy Sholl, As if a Song Could Save Us
Cornelia Veenendaal, a poet who has had time to perfect her craft, skillfully meshes images of country and city life and ancient and current history in Sky of Sudden Changes. Her acute sense of what will work and what will not and her enormous range of subject matter make this book a true capstone to her unusually long and cultivated life and career.
—Ellen Hersh, Uncapping the Chimney
Whether considering the mountains, the seashore, or the minds of artists and poets, Sky of Sudden Changes transports readers to realms simultaneously mundane and magical. Underscoring a long lifetime of reading and reflection, seeing and writing, Cornelia Veenendaal conjures an unforgettably idiosyncratic kaleidoscope of characters, human and otherwise. A luminous translator of artists' perspectives, Veenendaal also honors their subjects' perspectives, as she challenges us, in a brilliant trans-species insight, to acknowledge "the loneliness of the Queen's zebra." Elsewhere, human suffering emerges in restrained and heartbreaking images no other poet could envision: a childhood friend dying of cancer appears for the last time attending a dinner for six "in a strange round gray room, / like a hollow elephant's foot." Deftly and delicately, these achingly beautiful, virtuoso poems instruct us about love, loss, and survival; they illuminate the mystery and exhilaration of art, of metaphor. As one speaker affirms, "teaching is leading out to the sun." I am transformed by this collection's incandescence.
—Karen Kilcup, Feathers and Wedges
Cornelia Veenendaal is one of the founding members of Alice James Books, a cooperative press in which she published two collections of poems: The Trans-Siberian Railway and Green-Shaded Lamps. A third volume, What Seas What Shoreswas published by Rowan Tree Press, and a fourth, An Argument of Roots was published by BlazeVOX Books. She taught literature and writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston for 25 years. She now lives in New Hampshire.
