Luckier Than the Stars

Helga Kidder's Luckier Than The Stars is an essential American Odyssey that takes us from her childhood memories and post war Germany to present day America, "a life spent to fit and re-fit the broken pieces." Balanced between the two poles of a lucky life and the life of stars, the earth and what transcends us, Kidder brilliantly dramatizes her struggle to always move beyond, always "want more" as she says of the woman in Klimt's The Kiss. This is an odyssey of language, too, where she learns English, yes, but more-- learns to see a world that is incredibly alive, a world where the day is dressed in a robe, stars travel in gangs, branches clinch their fists. And why not? For, as she makes clear in "How To Hold On," the way one journeys forward to observe uniquely, to experience and to love what one sees-including the past which sounds forever like an "owl's persistent message." This is a world, after all, that we enter with her, journey with her, a world where "the past is a bell,/the present, a newborn sea turtle / racing to the ocean's moon." How can one not want to enter this world and make this journey?
-Richard Jackson, author of 10 books of poems, most recently Resonance, Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems, and Svetovi Narazen: Selected Poems.

When Helga Kidder's daughter says on her birthday "...Mom, this day is not only about me;/ it's about you..." she is also describing the way her grandmother lives in her mother and the way all of them animate the lyrical poems in Luckier Than The Stars. Helga holds a mirror to the revelations of family life, and the refracted light collapses time. Every poem immerses us in the blessings of experience, blessings of the immigrant, blessings of love and even of suffering, though also of simple causes of joy-ripened apples, stick bugs, crepe myrtle and tomatoes glowing in a vivid southern landscape. A master of metaphor and a vigilant seer of the extraordinary in the ordinary, Helga Kidder knows "...the past is a bell/ the present, newborn sea turtles/ racing to the ocean's moon..." and a hundred other lovely particulars, all braided by intelligence, honest feeling and bright imagination into a song of her seasons.
-Mary Kay Rummel, author of six books of poems, more recently What's Left is the Singing.