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The Moon’s Eye by Sheila Dietz

Name: The Moon's Eye by Sheila Dietz
SKU: 140336
Availability: InStock

Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

Sheila Dietz’s rich, observant poems about menacing forests, childhood betrayals, and bad dreams are receptacles that seem ready to explode any minute, releasing anger and sorrow but also a ferocious delight in life: in this world with its mothers, fathers, and sisters; its forests inhabited by bears—and in the one the poet saw when “the air around me split open.”

–Alice Mattison

Sheila Dietz confronts experience with the acuteness and steadfastness we associate with poets such as Hopkins and Transtromer. Like them, she understands her investigations of the natural world and the workings of memory can offer a glimpse of divinity at one moment, and a reckoning with dread in the next. Dietz writes wise and self-assured poems, noteworthy for striking metaphors, for bravura skill with the line and with syntax, and for a sure and steady command of autobiographical narrative. These are the poems of a mature and fearless poet, a writer of the very first order.

–David Wojahn

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The Moon’s Eye

by Sheila Dietz

Paper

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This title will be released on August 22, 2025

Sheila grew up with two sisters and a brother. They shared their lives with the ghosts of her mother’s three siblings all of whom died tragically, one as a baby, one at the age of four and the last, her mother’s brother, at the age of 18. Sheila’s family moved every 2-3 years as diplomatic families are required to do. As a result, she spent, off and on, most of her childhood living in Holland, going to a Dutch school. She learned a 2nd language, learned to monitor her speech because of her father’s work, and lived in a culture where her mother’s intense grief was not treated as it would be today. Sheila’s main outlet became her poems which detail how tragic experiences and debilitating grief, when untreated, have the power to damage following generations. This collection of poems reveals how it is possible to grow from the darkness of turmoil towards the light, but life is complicated, and darkness and light intermingle, coloring one another. This collection is about feeling and being unseen. The poems aim to evoke a sense of what it feels like to be unseen, even emotionally banished. The poems move as the poet does, towards feeling seen. Sheila does not presume that her experience has been the same for everyone but hopes, while respecting individual journeys, that her work resonates with others.

#PoeticHealing #GrowingFromDarkness #TransgenerationalTrauma #EmotionalBanishment #HopeInPoetry #FromUnseenToSeen #GenerationalGrief

Sheila Dietz grew up in the Netherlands, attended a Dutch school and began conceiving of the world in literary terns at an early age. Her family moved every 2-3 years, and she experienced all the chaos and dislocation that life entailed. The world she created by writing became her one true and safe home. Sheila has been a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has received an Individual Artist Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Numerous poems in The Moon’s Eye appear in her collection The Berry and the Bee which won the 2023 Gerald Cable First Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She received an MFA from Vermont College. She worked as a librarian at the New Haven Free Public Library for many years before retiring as Head of Reference Services. Sheila is the co-founder of the Salt and Pepper Gospel singers (from New Haven, Connecticut) which is reflected in her work which is often, though not always, spiritual in nature.