Reviews for The Misunderstanding of Nature

"Black is a passionate and breathlessly forceful writer...The Misunderstanding of Nature is a distinguished collection, one of the liveliest first books in years."
--Poetry

"When the book's long concluding poem finally caused me to go back and read everything that preceded it in a new light, I became aware --as if hit over the head -- of the rich complexity of this auspicious debut...Black astonishes with the places her poems go...and has a voice perfectly tuned to the dramatic monologue...the voice of Black as Bradford is a perfect ventriloquism, a delicate, devotional, and, at the same time, bold exploration of faith, discovery, longing, and perseverance...though these are 'songs of unsafety', we are far richer for having read them."
--Wyn Cooper, Agni

"...the primary themes herein are longing, betrayal and bereavement in their many nuances...It is an accomplished collection."
--Small Press

"Hers are poems which merge the erotic and the spiritual with an adamance as old as the Song of Songs, and with a prosody and lyrical richness of portraiture drawn from the Metaphysical poets and, especially. from the early Berryman. In her ardent and quirky sapphic love poems she echoes the Berryman of The Sonnets; in the ambition and pell-mell high modernist flourishes of her lengthy monologue 'The Arguments,' she models herself on the Berryman of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet."
--David Wojahn, Poetry

"...Altogether this is a beautiful book: in poem after poem, the topography of a late twentieth century landscape of impasse: 'There is only what you might do/And what you damage.'   'The Arguments' finds all this present but suppressed within the very origins of America -- and in the process a wild, leaping, beautiful music. Berryman's 'Homage to Mistress Bradstreet' has found an eloquent, authentic sister.
--Frank Bidart

"Black's book is dazzling in its range and ambition, its eloquence and mastery. I was especially impressed by the work's beautifully conceived and brilliantly executed long sequence called 'The Arguments,' which dramatizes the Mayflower's first confrontation with the wilderness of the New World from the perspective of the famous chronicler William Bradford's wife Dorothy. Throughout, however, from its richly ambiguous title to its expertly innovative sonnets and its poignant meditations on the 'necessary/Doubt of our age,' The Misunderstanding of Nature seems to me to be an almost startlingly accomplished first collection."
--Sandra Gilbert, Norma Farber Book Award

"...the emotionally charged diction, the exuberant orchestration of booming vowels...It's gratifying to know that poetry can do this. If Bradford, as heroine, loses unequivocally, her voice, thanks to Black, wins."
--Parnassus

"The language of 'The Arguments' is intense, written in the voice of a sensibility unable to protect itself from the primitive energy of a wild continent...It is a beautiful poem, rich with detail and psychological accuracies."
--Boston Magazine

"The Misunderstanding of Nature is a spare book, scrupulous and passionate."
--Poetry Flash

Reviews for The Descent

"Black's voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and The Descent is steep, precipitous and dazzling-all the way down from a hard-earned heaven."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"I have admired Sophie Cabot Black's poems for a long time, but this new book amazes me; I am amazed by such primal sincerity, such necessity-driven authenticity. Something has asked her to awake to and endure a revelation-that the outer and inner worlds are one and the same place; clearly, she has obeyed, and she has done so with true passion, dread, humility, and ecstasy. And in some of these poems, such as the almost unbearably poignant 'Birthday,' she has achieved a quiet greatness."
--Franz Wright

"Sophie Cabot Black's poems, in their measured grace, have a quiet intensity, animated by her passion for a clarity of understanding, in the art as in the life."
--Stanley Kunitz

"In Sophie Cabot Black's poems, we find the world flashingly seen and stabbingly felt. By turns imagistic and metaphysical, tender and brutal, the poems in The Descent are as alert to mountainscapes, coyotes, newborn foals, cougars, and bristlecone as to the violences and mysteries of human love. Cabot's is 'the light which and asks for more'."
--Rosanna Warren

"In her own quiet, approaching way, Black dissects love and relationships at length, a sense of longing that's reiterated over and over and never fulfilled."
--Fairfield Weekly

"Following her first distinguished collection, The Misunderstanding of Nature,award-winning poet Sophie Cabot Black scores again in bringing her considerable talent to The Descent. Written in lyrical passages, it is a book of quiet, almost primordial, intensity in its metaphors and similes."
--The Sanford Herald

"Sophie Cabot Black is an award-winning poet whose lyrical verse and revelatory images evoke and highlight doubt, loss, survival, and spiritual resilience. The Descent is her second published collection and continues to document her unmistakable voice and literary talent."
--Midwest Book Review

In September 2004, The Descent was a Hot Pick on MSNBC's program, Topic A With Tina Brown.