O Song

By: Sharon Webster

Published by Fomite, 2025-09-15

<p>Sharon Webster's second collection of poems and art, O Song, sings the richness of everyday life: its outrageous surprises, abundant sensuality, unavoidable losses, and nuanced emotions. A "pickin' party" in Kentucky, a saxophone's wail, the loss of a beloved brother, complex love of birthplace - all this and more is explored in poems rich with lyric invention and suggestion. Evocative color images of Webster's multi-media visual art add a soulful, non-verbal dimension to the depth, beauty and music of Webster's yearnings and vivid perspectives.</p><p></p><p>"O, what a wonderful book! -- sometimes quirky and exuberant; sometimes tender, elegiac; sometimes dark, raw. But always Sharon Webster notices things: the family house exactly somewhere between a tobacco field and suburbia. And the crows! A tree cries/ through the night/ swollen with crows."</p><p>-Sue D. Burton, author of poetry collections, Box and Little Steel </p><p></p><p>"O Song is an outpouring of sound in visceral threads where colors cluster below the surface and shine. In this land where the soft white ghost of our cat/ comes back to watch at the window, Sharon Webster dissolves the boundaries between art and music, making room for the words/ in our laps/ like warm nets. She flows through the nature of cloth, through intimate grief of losing a bluegrass-infused brother, past ancestors in the mirror, to alight on branches heavy with crows. Webster's lyricism is a treasured friend from whom You can part company and not be gone."</p><p>-Cindy Ellen Hill, author of Love in a Time of Climate Change, Wild Earth, and Elegy for the Trees</p>