Glacier Fire asks you to read with the ear both composer and musician attend to music -- who but Martha Vertreace-Doody will rhyme-riff a sestina's repeating word us, with rosettes, musk, tulips, and the repeating word one with numbers two, three, clear down to the seventh day in the poem's coda? These poems weave a bliss of language until you are like the bridge scaler in 'Brooklyn Bridge,' 'a bown striped/ spider webbed in candles of black pine,' touched to flame by their music.
Lucia Cordell Getsi


In Glacier Fire, Martha Modena Vertreace-Dooody reveals her deft touch as a cartographer of the human heart. She maps 'the known world' that we move through and that moves inexorably through us, rife with the flora and fauna of daily life becoming suddenly exotic. Both celestial and earthly, American and Celtic, this collection's various locales bristle with things rising and falling -- bread rising in the kitchen and meteors blazing across the night sky. Hers is a welcome and mature vision, honoring equally endings and beginnings, the beloved dead and the pleasures of newlyweds' marital bed. In sum, this book's choris of voices offers a litany of heartfelt aphorisms, the poet's collective wisdom to live and die by.
Kevin Stein