Dreams and Dreamers

There are sensibilities time cannot dull or the imperfections of memory degrade. In Dreams and Dreamers, Lynn Carroll Cohen offers her readers these. In her finest poems, she displays a rare gift-recollections that are tender and yet enduring, reflections that are deeply passionate and yet in possession of discernment and terrific grace. A bravura performance! -George Wallace First Suffolk County Poet Laureate Lynn Cohen's Dreams and Dreamers evokes a palpably inflamed sensuality that doesn't dissipate into the thin air of dreams, disillusionment, and the taut arrow of time because "In the primal hours / of the private present," Cohen can embrace "a personal communion" by "composing [her] history" in a compelling world where, as "Life erases itself," she can generate the ardently ultimate reality of the human heart. -Gayl Teller Nassau County Poet Laureate Lynn Cohen's poems are tender elegies for lost youth, passion and ease. At once graceful and economical, these lyrics offer bright glimpses of city and country, of travel and remembered haunts. Like the dreams of her title, they are like stories in miniature, deftly moving back and forth in time, lit with flashes of insight. Childhood anticipates future scars; middle age looks back to simpler ardor. Cohen uses a compact, elegant style to create a lucid world of longing. -Martha Hollander Winner Whitman Award under W. S. Merwin Lynn Cohen was nominated for the 2006 and 2010 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. She gave a scholarly paper at the Gerard Manley Hopkins Literary Festival in 2009 in Ireland. As a result of a grant proposal she wrote, the New York State Council for the Humanities awarded the North Sea Poetry Scene a mini-grant for its "Let's Talk Poetry 2008" series. She has spoken on the works of T. S. Eliot at a National MLA Conference and at local conferences on Christianity and Literature. She also has lectured on modern and post-modern literature, and she has given poetry readings in the United States and in Ireland. She was a student and mentee of Pulitzer Prize Winners Stephen Dunn and W. D. Snodgrass. She co-edited The North Sea Poetry Scene's LI Sounds 2007 Poetry Anthology and other poetry anthologies. Lynn teaches at Hofstra University and Suffolk Community College.