Inspired by the legacy of Cesare Pavese, Judith Vollmer's The Pavese Stone unfolds across the Italian countryside and burrows deep into the interior landscapes of memory, mortality, and connection. This is a vivid, haunting, and intimate meditation on the porous boundary between life and death, the longing for communion, the brutality of reality, and the quiet grace that resides within it.
In these pages, fortitude, elegy, and quiet dignity are interwoven with a profound desire for expansion. Vollmer's poems offer a sharp attentiveness to the textures of daily life, remaining firmly grounded in the physical world even as the speaker questions the soul's place within it. This is a book of deep listening and keen observation, where even the smallest gesture--such as severing the leather cords of a tethered owl--becomes an act of radical grace. The Pavese Stone reminds us of the power in meeting another's gaze and truly witnessing.
Near the end, Vollmer invites the reader to embrace and celebrate the ceremony of what one might even consider an unceremonious life: "Here is a ring I would slide onto your finger, / a plain thread." The poems of The Pavese Stone find their beauty in the ordinary, elevating moments of stillness and loss into sacred space.
Vollmer, Judith: -
Judith Vollmer's seventh book of poetry, The Pavese Stone, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2026. The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2022 University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize; other collections have been awarded the Brittingham, the Cleveland State, and the Center for Book Arts publication prizes. Reactor was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in The Los Angeles Times Book Review.The Door Open to the Fire received finalist honors for the Paterson Prize. Vollmer is recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and artist residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, Blue Mountain Center, and the Centrum Foundation, among others. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in Plume, Rhino, Barrow Street, The Georgia Review, The Women's Review of Books, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is Professor Emerita of the University of Pittsburgh/Greensburg, and recipient of the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of Pittsburgh. For three decades, Vollmer co-edited the international poetry journal 5 AM. Her essay on Baudelaire, "The Stroll and Preparation for Departure," is included in the Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge University Press). She has read her work internationally at colleges, universities, museum and galleries, arts organizations, and community centers. Vollmer has taught in low-residency programs at New England College's MFA in Poetry, the Drew University Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and most recently in Carlow University's MFA Program. She lives in Pittsburgh's Nine Mile Run watershed.
