Current

Purchase

Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026

The poems in Barbara Carlson’s Current take us under the surface into what lives below and just to the side of the material world. Her words do that miraculous thing of leading us to the edge of the unsayable, a “higher stillness” full of wonder. Carlson can move with the apparent ease of an aerialist from an abandoned nest, to a ruined mansion’s broken windows, to the centuries pressed into rock—each image becoming part of the next and enlarging the whole. This is a book of transformations—not loud splashy ones, but the deeper, more quiet ones that come out of silence and the astute attention that Simone Weil calls prayer, or Carlson herself calls the “windless unseen light that opens us within.” Whether on a Roman street or walking alongside a bog near her home, Carlson gives us a place “for the soul to lie down and be gathered.” In our way too transactional world, these poems are crucial, their currents carry us back to mystery, to the immensity of life, until “whatever it is that separates us fades away.”

—Betsy Sholl author of As if a Song Could Save You

Barbara Siegel Carlson’s spellbinding work pulls us deep into otherness without ever leaving the paths of trees, ravines, and clouds we know so well. Her poems have the quality of the miraculous: “I ask and holy that came to me in human form.” We experience this poet’s gifts as an immersion, her music and lyric voice welcoming the reader into stunning poems of wonder and grief, poems of the liminal that are fully alive in the hazard world and in mystery itself.

—Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath

Barbara Carlson’s Current is a book of transformations—not bold splashy ones, but the deeper, more quiet ones that come out of looking closely, of being at home on the paths you walk regularly. Carlson herself calls the “windless unseen light that opens us within.” Whether on a Roman street or walking alongside a dog near her home, Carlson gives us a place “for the soul to lie down and be gathered.” In our way too transactional world, these poems are crucial, their currents carry us back to mystery, to the immensity of life, until “whatever it is that separates us fades away.”

—Betsy Sholl, author of As If A Song Could Save You

In Barbara Carlson’s Current, “Each scrap reveals an unseen world,” and only this fine poet’s sustained attention, and consummate craft, allows those “scraps” to speak. The poems of Current bless us with the knowledge that there is “a breath / that falls through the branches / and rises through the roots.” I feel challenged and strengthened by these poems, emancipated from dejection, encouraged by their insistence on tenderness and reverence. I am grateful for this book, which I know I will read again.

—Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

BLESSING A STONE

Stones along the dirt road shine

in quiet hues at dawn.

Their colors deepen

as the smell of light

revives on the moist road.

I pick one up and rub

the striations, as if I could draw

from the lines some message,

some memory of its passage.

Pausing, I close my eyes

and see the stars. I can almost

reach through the light

and dark particles that hold all I am

to know where I’m going.

What Drifted Here

Purchase

Cherry Grove Collections, 2023

What Drifted Here is a book of that dwells in the silent, often overlooked or seemingly ordinary places where the mysterious and miraculous abide, and where amidst love and grief, we draw ever closer to the heart of the spiritual. The poems, some in prose form and dramatic monologue, take dreamlike leaps into worlds both personal and historical, glimpsing through the cracks something we can never wholly know but which leaves us changed.

“The lines of Barbara Siegel Carlson’s poems are like the filaments that Walt Whitman’s ‘noiseless patient spider’ launches out of itself. Flung across time and space into the silence, Carlson’s lines catch, in their ‘fine netting,’ the lonely truths of the inward self. And more: they connect us to foreign cities, to voices from the past and strangers observed in the present, to spirit and soul. In ‘Provisional,’ Carlson describes spiders in the weeds at dawn, how each weaves a web to ‘capture what it needs / and lets the rest blow through’: so, too, for these stunning, necessary poems.”

—Jennifer Barber

“Maybe I’m just hungry for mystical connections,’ Barbara Carlson muses in one poem and true to that idea, she does, again and again, finding expansive meanings and experiences in the simple cares of everyday. From Russia to Slovenia to Italy, Alaska, even Mars and to her own Cape Cod area of Massachusetts, she leads us on a journey that is part naturalist’s part spiritualist’s. While she admits she can’t ‘Penetrate a Soul / Or hold a Bird in Flight,’ her words certainly can. These are poems where ‘the wind […] will never stop calling,’ where we never stop being surprised and lifted, where we will keep returning to.”

—Richard Jackson

“Barbara Carlson’s book, What Drifted Here is exactly where you like an experienced poet to go: into the world’s gray with a pen, paper, and all her senses. She knows everything is an omen, everything is alive with meaning, and everything requires the observant mind to make some sense of it all. ‘Every morning the dark turns light to see something small.’ These are the words this book thrives by!”

—J.P. Dancing Bear