In her first book, Soundings, Georgia Greeley brings the eye of an artist and the heart of a poet to her reflections on nature, relationships, art, illness and mortality. A deep love of family and friends are at the core of Greeley’s poems—smart poems full of grace and warmth.

Praise for Soundings

Grace, generosity, perception, deep affection and wry humor characterize the poems in Georgia Greeley’s wise first book, Soundings. In “Elevation—Above the Tree Line,” she knows the moment when the soul comes to life and really sees; that “crack and thunder of avalanche” when artistic insight surges through stillness like a roar. The love of family and friends forms a core theme in Greeley’s work, whether in poems about travel or gardens. Ultimately, these objects of her affection become characters orbiting like planets throughout the book. Greeley’s same, generous gaze never flinches in the section, “Cancer,” where she looks loss in the eye, spits a time or two, muses, grieves, questions, and even laughs—cognizant that the twin containers of sorrow and joy are the same. She knows that “somehow this river stretches my heart,/ until it can hold/ all that it is given to hold.” Greeley is a poet buoyant with conviction, always in possession of “the unshakeable belief— //liftoff is possible.”
—Ethna McKiernan, author of The One Who Says You Can’t Start Over (Salmon Publishing, August  2002)