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Reviews

“Early in this book, Barbara Hurd confronts the reader with the scary and fascinating proposition, a medical conjecture, that many of us are actually twins in our single bodies and oblivious of it.  In her compelling, well-crafted poems Hurd carries us through varied perspectives on this theme of self-accompaniment.  We encounter sea urchins, Dr. Jekyll, a grackle falling down a stovepipe, Monet, the cinema, Elvis, Eros, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, Doubting Thomas, Peter Pan, an egret and Gyoto monks.  We ride double on a motorcycle in India.  We are taken into a surreal dream of an anthropomorphic cave that has aggressive sexual intentions.  Hurd takes us where we never have been, which is the job of a poet, and she does it well.  Her voice is genuine and convincing, her versification is sure, and above all, her poems are interesting. Once I began, I read the book through; I was drawn from poem to poem. Altogether, this is a splendid collection.  Read it—you will be more than doubly pleased.
--Richard Frost, Awards Judge, Bright Hill Poetry Prize

“Hurd’s seamless tone, her luminous eloquence are so generous, so wise that we are enriched and appeased by them—and grateful for this intelligent, consoling, enlightened book.” 
--Laure-Anne Bosselaar

“When unpredictability arrives paired with inevitability, as is true in poem after poem of The Singer’s Temple, one of the great paradoxes of art stands before us.  When that paradox comes clothed in language both unpretentious and rich, we feel exhilarated, restored, elegantly haunted.  You have to give your heart and mind over to this collection of Barbara Hurd’s, but then doesn’t the best work always insist on that extraction?”
--Gray Jacobik