"The Sky-Blue Dress"
from Cathy Song's
The Land of Bliss

Cathy Song:

The Land of Bliss is Cathy Song's fourth book of poetry. Her first, Picture Bride, was the winner of the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books are Frameless Windows, Squares of Light and School Figures. Song's poetry has been widely anthologized in such publications as Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Her poems have also appeared on the buses of Atlanta, the subway cars of New York, the Poetry Daily web site, and, most recently, in The Best American Poetry 2000. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, the Shelly Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Hawaii Award for Literature, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize. Song earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. from Boston University. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she lives with her husband and three children. (Photograph of Cathy Song by John Eddy)

About The Land of Bliss:

Cathy Song's fourth collection of poetry unveils glimpses of the elusive but ever-present power of wisdom and compassion. Recognizing that we have the ability to create our own misery as well as our own bliss, she finds the unexpected in broken lives, despair, and even seemingly joyous occasions.

"To read poems as true on the tongue and the eye as these is a deep, transcendent sweetness. I feel transported, restored to gravity-ground, melodious mind."
— Naomi Shihab Nye

"To follow Cathy Song's collection of poems over the years is to reach, in this season, 'The Expense of Mildew'; from daughter, to wife and mother, to the daughter of aging parents, Song has arrived full spiral. This is bliss."
— Kimiko Hahn

"I keep recognizing my own various approaches to and avoidances of the writing job: the just claims which keep me from it, my need to hide my meaning at the same time as I reveal it, the need to go, 'deeper into the darkest room,' trying to reach 'the core of something permanent,' and what always accompanies that need — 'distraction itself... obstacles to keep her from entering the last room,' wanting and not wanting to arrive there."
— Phyllis Hoge

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