When Sunset Weeps: Homage to Emily Dickinson, by George H. Northrup

When Sunset Weeps: Homage to Emily Dickinson, by George H. Northrup, is a small collection of original poems with an outsize goal: to imitate not only the style, but the very consciousness itself, of Emily Dickinson, sampling the breadth of her interests in nature and human nature, the daunting puzzles of spirituality, and especially her profound understanding of grief and loss.

Sample Poems by George Northrup

"Wherever Emily Dickinson is, I suspect she is smiling over George H. Northrup's apt and clever celebration of her by what has been called the sincerest form of flattery: imitation.

The author has composed a series of poems that impersonate one of the most distinctive and beloved voices in American poetry, and not simply by borrowing her techniques-her dashes, with their suggestion of impatience and total spontaneity, her wrenched syntax, her apparent metrical simplicity, the surprising diction that skews its way into the unexpected, and the startling imagery that keeps every surprise fresh even after repeated readings-but also by imitating the playfulness with which she tackles even such somber material as the arrival of death, and grief as the materia prima of art.

One gem in this collection begins, 'Gossip is the crumb of Truth/ That from the table fell.' The housewifely note, the imagined presence of the dog who will lick it up but whose 'tongue will never tell' is pure Emily, as is the image of sunlight slicing through the trees and 'Buttering the lawn,' and the observation that 'The Garret of a happy mind/ Needs nowhere else to go.'" -Rhina P. Espaillat

"In this collection, the reader enjoys the artistry of George H. Northrup in poems that echo the deft power of Emily Dickinson. Exploring not only the human experience, but also the human experiencing the world, Northrup's poems are carefully observed, wonderfully evocative, and vividly expressed."-Barbara Novack

ISBN: 978-1625493569, 30 pages

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