As the title suggests, a keen ekphrastic impulse sparks many of these poems, which are marked by a scrupulous attention to detail that conjures both Rilke and Moore. Yet Mabbitt, speculative and probing, often expands and transforms ekphrasis, veering suddenly from what she observes into psychological terrains of acute self-awareness, tenderness, or urgency. Conversely, her habit of meticulous description enhances poems of family, memory, objects, and experience, so that a pair of inherited salt and pepper shakers may appear as revelatory as a Rodin. These are thus deftly stealthy poems-that surprise and provoke in the most rewarding way.
-Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Ashley Mabbitt's debut collection A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through gifts us with a speaker attuned to the most delicate shifts and nuances of the internal and external realms. Psychologically astute and alert, curious and care-filled, Mabbitt's poems divine the worlds contained within the smallest of objects, the briefest of gestures. And whether imagining themselves into the lost portraits of Velazquez or a forgotten jar of jelly on a refrigerator shelf, they harken to the odd angle, the easily disregarded, the unsaid and undreamed-of-undreamed-of, that is, except by this poet, whose serious, steady looking turns again and again into a generous and capacious seeing, a tender mirror welcoming "great flocks of migrating birds."