A Ship to Hold the World & The Marionette's Ascent: A Double Volume of Poetry by Annabelle Moseley
"Like a sumptuous Northern diptych—Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment, say—Annabelle Moseley’s twinned volumes treat Biblical subjects through stunning compositions and vivid colors. In A Ship to Hold the World, Old Testament voices speak from the embers of ancient narratives with a contemporary spark. In The Marionette’s Ascent, it is not Dante who makes this spiritual journey but our semblable, a puppet, dancing to another’s tune: we are all, at times, willing or unwilling marionettes, the book suggests, and who of us cannot feel the truth of this. Moseley pulls the strings in these signal volumes, and the resulting show is mesmerizing."—David Yezzi
"When we pray, we put our two hands together, a symbolic gesture made possible because our bodies rhyme. In this amazing collection, Annabelle Moseley has hinged together two books, which, on first glance, would seem to be very different than our matching hands: venerable voices from the Old Testament in the first book, followed by the far more contemporary voice of 'Marion,' a highly opinionated stringed puppet who has 'dropped the ette' from her name. Moseley is a master of music in both volumes. Her characters speak in a perfect pentameter line, unnoticed because flawless. This poet knows line breaks: when to enjamb and when not. So never do we get the 'Hallmark Card' effect. Instead, these are living voices we can really believe. 'It’s dancing through restraint that is the test,' says Marion, and Annabelle Moseley has done just that in these remarkable poems."—Bruce Guernsey
