Blue, Candled in January Sun

Sybil Pitttman Estess' Blue, Candled in January Sun is a book for the eye, ear, and heart. Her bracing music and gift for the luminous detail always work to reach the deepest wellsprings of human experience.

“Sybil Estess’ work is trenchant, witty, worldly in its stance and allusiveness, and crackingly alive. I admire how her poems consistently negotiate the gulf between privilege and suffering through an active and ever-ready empathy, humor, and compassion.” —Cyrus Cassells

“I find much to admire in this collection, which is distinctive both for its surety of craft and its stunning diversity of subjects.” —Laurence Lieberman

“What [Estess’ poems] are really about is emotional connections—the ‘countless silken ties of love and thought’ Robert Frost attributed his woman’s tent’s stability to in his sonnet ‘The Silken Tent.’ They are strong, straightforward, painfully moving poems in which [often] the places they describe serve as particular containers for fluid and archetypal relationships.” —Janet McCann

“Sybil Pittman Estess writes on very serious subjects—good versus evil, the flesh and the spirit—yet a singularly delightful nature shines through everything she writes. She seeks epiphanies among the quotidian, and finds them in unexpected places. Poems such as ‘Ash Wednesday and the Houston Anglican Priest,’ ‘One Thing It Was,’ ‘Festina Lente’ and ‘Search for Perfect Blue’ are as fine as the best of her fellow Houstonian and sister spiritual seeker Vassar Miller. Sybil Estess fuses fine craftsmanship with a keen sense of reality. She is the real thing.” —Robert Phillips

Click below to read the review of Blue, Candled in January Sun in the Houston Chronicle Zest Magazine on January 1, 2006: