“I am the keeper of my family’s legacy,” Judith Lee Herbert writes in her debut collection, bringing us poems of grace, gravity and rich detail. In this archive is her father fighting Nazis in hand-to-hand combat, her grandparents drinking hot chocolate from a beautiful set with geishas and cherry blossoms, and her own late romance and motherhood at 46. At the center of Songbird, in snowy dreams and displaced memories, is the poet’s beloved mother, whose “words are leaving her,/like birds flying south,/silhouettes across the moon.” It is with these poems of abundance and loss that Herbert fulfills her promise.
~ Amy Holman, author of Wrens Fly Through This Open Window.

These elegant and accessible poems by Judith Lee Herbert take us through city landscapes and lush countrysides, through birth and death, through myth and reality, through time and across borders. They deserve to be savored, read, and re-read.
~ Janice Eidus, author of The War of the Rosens and The Last Jewish Virgin.

In her brilliant debut collection, Judith Lee Herbert weaves a tapestry of beauty and loss, luminescence and aging. These accessible and compelling poems combine memory with incandescent moments. In Jones Beach, 1963, “windless tranquility” and the “lulling sounds of waves” are the setting for unnerving anti-Semitism. There is a Keatsian sensibility in The Vase, a poem that makes time stand still in the best tradition of the Grecian urn, a vase “Still elegant/ethereal.” The powerful Archivist mingles menaces without and within, Cossack horror and insidious disease. Yet amidst the hazards of Snowfall, the poet is “soaring through silvery light.” Finally, in Letter to My Father, powerful memories of World War Two combat coexist with the poignancy of recollection largely lost. Judith Lee Herbert’s words move with exceptional grace between lost past and evocative present, with as fine of a touch as can be found in poetry.
~ Lee Slonimsky, author of Consulting with the Swifts and Lion, Gnat.

Every time I read or listen to one of Judy’s poems, I find myself carried into the worlds and experiences her poems express. The journeys are deep and powerful, and I find myself eagerly settling in for a rich experience.
~ Nancy J. Napier, author of Sacred Practices for Conscious Living.

Songbird
By Judith Lee Herbert