Catharine Savage Brosman

In addition to the volumes listed below, she has published four chapbooks of verse, and her poems have been reprinted in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.

[1] John Irwin Fischer spoke of Watering as “a community of individual verse shaped toward a vision of man which acknowledges both his uniqueness and his role in some still dark harmony.”.

[2] Another reviewer called the collection “understated, splendidly wrought.”[3] D. E. Richardson, one of several reviewers who have mentioned Emily Dickinson in connection with Brosman, wrote that she “convinces us in the way of the old meditative landscape poetry that nature is full of human meanings which we must notice lest we fail as human souls.”[4] Vassar Miller called the book “a delightful shock” and remarked that Brosman had “only one way to go—up.”[5] Subsequent assessments have been similarly favorable.

Reviewing her second collection, Donald Stanford praised the form, “her own special kind of free verse—sensitive, perceptive, subtly rhythmical—quite superior to that of most practitioners of the medium.”[6] Concerning her third book, David Slavitt noted, “She started out well and keeps getting better... Why she hasn’t been laden with honors and awards is an unfathomable mystery to me.”[7] Gray Jacobik wrote that the New Mexico poems in that book “capture the radiance of that place better than any I have ever read that use the American Southwest for a setting.”[8] Reviewing Places in Mind, David Middleton asserted that Brosman was still at the height of her powers and singled out for commendation the poem “Crab Cakes.”[9] In starred reviews for Booklist, Ray Olson commended the “exceptionally well crafted” poems in The Muscled Truce and wrote that Range of Light stood “with much of Mary Austin and certain pages of Willa Cather among the finest poetry” of the American west.

"[12] In a review of On the Old Plaza for Booklist, Ray Olson wrote, "Each poem, whatever its particular excellences, affords the company of one of the most delightfully acute, witty, and capable poets now writing.