University of Chicago Press 1996
"Jeredith Merrin's Shift is one of the most poised and thoroughly fulfilled first books I've read in years. The book exists in an admirably luminous, sustaining light. Shift convincingly renders the seismic change, the unyielding bonds beneath one seriously lived life." -- Frank Bidart
"Jeredith Merrin's Shift is aptly titled - from the first page we are tilted, spun, and swept away on waves of waking dream . . . Jeredith Merrin is master of the space, velocity, and lost gravity of our longing: she is a natural painter, an intuitive and astonishing lyric poet." -- Carol Muske
University of Chicago Press 2001
"The shocks of daily life -- the apparition of a dead bat, the murder of a beloved maple -- are occasions, in Jeredith
Merrin's finely made poems, for the deep fissures and stresses beneath the surface to emerge, to be examined, considered, to become the occasions for a humane, sobering and fierce sort of song." -- Mark Doty
"the poems in Jeredith Merrin's new book, Bat Ode, are unblinkingly attentive and true to the life around her, and to her own life as well. She looks right at her subjects, steadily undiverted by egotism or sentimentality so that a clear light shines on these poems; and an extraoridarily adept and unshowy versification contributes to this clarity." -- David Ferry
