The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fascination with the possibilities that exist at every moment and the human urge to resist the inevitable and keep those possibilities open. The language of these poems ...
Margot Schilpp’s poems seem to display an instinctively acute knowledge—of the differences between one’s inner personality and one’s social identity, between expectations and realizations, or between mere want and deep desire—that results in readers also obtaining an intuitive understanding about ourselves and how we fit into our own surroundings. In “Ghost Ships” the poet wonders: ...
Schilpp … has keen interest in the ways language limits and extends our mental constructs, and in The World’s Last Night we find moral quandary as well as imagination’s opportunity in the fact that we can use language only to convince rather than to evince, only to represent rather than to present actual experience: “the stars ...
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