PeaceBang

Letters From Siberia

February 1, 2005 on 7:52 pm | In Inspirations, Shout-Outs, TV/Movies/Theatre/Book Reviews |

My friend, the poet Sophie Wadsworth, has published her first book!
This description appeared recently in a Harvard Gazette article by Beth Potier:

“When Roxanna Lord Pray - Roxy to all who knew her - left Maine as a newlywed to join her husband’s family in Siberia in 1894, she sent home letters. Thousands of letters, written throughout her 36 years in Vladivostok, rich with details of her life, images of East Siberia, and the mood of the time in which she lived.”

Sophie is Roxy’s great-granddaughter, who took those letters and wrote a gorgeous book of poems about them, including this one:

I picture Siberia, three weeks away:
deep snowy trees sleep along the horizon.
Another heave, I slide into a blue

hallucination … a swirling alphabet of snow …
Cossacks shouting, whipping the hull
to outrace a squall … I lurch locked inside
a giant trunk marked Roxanna Lord

– from “Passage to Vladivostok, 1894,” Sophie Wadsworth

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Don’t you just want to buy this book? You can! Send $11.50 to Sophie at 22 Old Mill Road, Harvard, MA 01451. I bet she’ll even sign the copy for you.