What Just Happened

Sara Berkeley Tolchin’s new collection of poems begins: “I’d like my heart / to be without conditions, / to crack each day a little more open,” an ambition these vibrant, airy poems explore in the book’s copious reach. Many of them reflect on themes of loss and losing: “My mother is missing. The stars too, / the stars are not where I left them, / they are not in their constellations.”

As Wes Davis observed, in his Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, “her rich poems — and her sharp eye for details of the natural world — are given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country.” What Just Happened includes poems set on the west coasts of Ireland and the United States. But “the rumble beneath her poetic language,” Davis continues, “is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships.”

Flights — actual and imaginary — embrace a search for “true north, / the secret heart of all things.” Though they address places where “much hurt comes to rest” they sing “O holy life” and frame a time that was “a good day . . . full of miracles.”

Praise for What Just Happened

“Sara Tolchin’s new collection, What Just Happened, contains poems that explore ‘The heart without compass/ The journey without a map’ in an Irish and Californian setting. These wise, sensory poems about living far from home, her mother’s death, an ex-husband’s suicide, her 13-year-old daughter learning to drive, and coyotes, achieve ‘a benediction of some sort.’”

— Niall MacMonagle, editor, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916

“Tolchin’s rich poems—and her sharp eye for details of the natural world—are given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country.... The rumble beneath her poetic language is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships.”

— Wes Davis, editor, Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry