Susan de Sola
 

On Twitter, Marcia Menter has reported that Susan de Sola (I think she's de Sola Rodstein as a member here) has died of lymphoma at age 59.

Her tweet is here: https://twitter.com/MenterMarcia/sta...82851520106504

This will be shocking news to many, as I don't think most of us had any idea she was ill. Such a loss.

That is surprising. I think of her family and wish them the best and my condolences.

Yes, quite shocking. Very sad news.

Oh, Maryann, that is such sad and startling news.

My wife and I saw Susan in Amsterdam in 2019, and Susan and I had plans for a Boston-area reading the following spring, when both of us were scheduled to appear at the Newburyport Literary Festival. The 2020 Festival was cancelled, of course, but Susan and I have seen each other at online readings since then. Never seeing her in person again is a lot to adjust to.

This is truly terrible news. Such a kind person and wonderful poet. She will be very much missed.

This is shocking. I have known her for years through her attendance at poetry conferences at West Chester and Poetry by the Sea, and I thought both she and her poetry were delightful and memorable. I will miss her very much. I had no idea that she was ill, having seen her only online at readings during the pandemic.

Susan

This is devastating news. I just got an email to this effect from one of Susan's best friends and was going to post here and saw Maryann's instead. Susan will be greatly missed!

...Alex

Editing back in to add that it was only last December that she read with us from her debut collection (here), and since then has been at several such readings including ones at Carmine Street and the Powow Festival this year. So, this sad news feels all the more sudden and unexpected.

I met her here. I guess a lot of us did. Finally met her for real where else but West Chester. We corresponded frequently, but not in a while. I'm so surprised and saddened. She's been active on Facebook until recently. Newly a grandmother. I've been meaning to touch base.

This is so sad. I met her several times at West Chester and here in Venice with her family, when we went for a long walk.

She was a wonderful poet and a lovely person.

Unexpected and terrible news. I can't remember the last time I saw her: either West Chester or in New York for dinner. Either way, she was always lovely and warm. I'll be looking through Little Blue Man tonight.

I'm so sorry. I didn't know her personally, but I know this poem, published a few years ago:

https://autumnskypoetrydaily.com/201...susan-de-sola/

- it's a marvellous, beautiful, subtle poem, I think, and I remembered it as soon as I saw the thread.

My thoughts and sympathies are with Susan de Sola's family and all of you who knew her.

Sarah-Jane

In this often depressing, macabre world we live in, I appreciate the reality-grounded optimism in Susan's work. She had a gift for finding something life-affirming to celebrate even in seemingly unpromising topics, and her joy in sharing those discoveries permeated her poems.

The poem is significant, Sarah, because her name means 'lily', why she wrote the poem as well as for love of the painting.

She was my Lily. My Lily-love.

Remember this?: https://constant-never.blogspot.com/...t-flowers.html

The last photo -- she's there in the middle of us.

Not that I could ever ever forget it! A decade and a world ago. <3

I never knew her but have heard about her. My sincere condolences to her family and those who knew her better. So very sad. That's far too soon to go.

Shocking! I think the last time I met her was at the Frost Farm several years back, but Susan and I were fellow New Yorkers, we both summered on Fire Island (many years apart) before she moved to Europe, and when we saw each other loved to gossip about the old days. She was a class act.

I just cannot believe it; it won't sink in. I'm totally devastated to hear this news. Susan and I struck up a great friendship at West Chester in 2012.

We had a "thing" where we laughed and joked about trying to match up socks when doing the family laundry. (Susan had many pairs to deal with back then, with her five children!) She took to calling me Socks as a nickname; that's something I will treasure.

Susan was a physically beautiful woman, but also a beautiful person in the emotional sense. She will be missed SO much by her family and friends, many of whom didn't even know that she was ill.

Like Walter, I'll be pulling Little Blue Man off my bookshelf to look at again, in fond remembrance of a poet and friend I loved.

Jayne

Just read Alex’s post on Facebook (where I rarely go these days), and am utterly devastated by the news, impossible to fathom. I only knew Susan virtually (including by mail), but felt close to her - her warmth and sense of humor, her kindness, just a radiant beautiful person in every sense of the word. We both had 5 children, although in different ways, which she expressed in a poem that captured her wit, intellect, humor, poetic sense… And another poem of hers written in the language of a rock! What an imagination, what a loss. She is absolutely irreplaceable and I feel the loss as if she had been part of my family. One can say a life well-lived, she will not be forgotten.

I never met Susan in person, but was sad to see this news on Twitter yesterday. I just knew her as a talented poet here on the Sphere and other places online. Susan's remarkable recent poem "The Hunger Winter" was a finalist in the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, and just published in Plough: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/cul...-winter-1944-5.

My condolences to her family and friends.

Like so many of you, I'm reeling at this loss. Not only did I enjoy hanging out with Susan at conferences, I had the privilege of publishing a number of her poems in Light and, in 2018, was delighted to learn that "Buddy," the poem I had chosen as the winner of the Frost Farm Prize, was hers. What a great weekend we spent in Derry with the Powows! "Buddy" is part of Susan's indelible collection, Frozen Charlotte, and you can also read it here.

Very, very sad… My wife and I have been away from home for a few days at a memorial event for a close friend in Dorset. Yesterday evening, on our return, I received an email from Susan’s husband. The news did not come as a surprise. Susan had been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma early last year. We had been in frequent touch up to a fortnight ago. The signs were not promising, and she was understandably both frightened and sad.

Susan and I fell into correspondence about ten years back. An early fruit of this correspondence was Little Blue Man—her engaging photographs and my poem responding to them. Not long after, Susan began sending me for comment the poems that were eventually published in Frozen Charlotte in 2019, a year that I think was for her an annus mirabilis. She was able to read from her book at events in the States and, later, at online events—indeed, as recently as this April.

She and I managed to meet face-to-face on only three occasions. The first was in 2013, when she brought her daughter, Eve, to London to celebrate an important birthday. We had lunch in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Susan handed over my share of the copies of Little Blue Man which we had published together. A year or two later my wife and I were visiting The Netherlands on one of our frequent visits to long-standing and very close Dutch friends. The three of us had lunch in Amsterdam—in fact, in the Amsterdam Centraal Grand Café with its famous cockatoo. Our last meeting was in 2015. Susan had been commissioned to write a piece about silverpoint drawing. That year the British Museum held a major exhibition of such work. Susan came over to London to see it, and the two of us had a very agreeable lunch at the Museum.

I very much valued our exchange of poems and ideas and gossip down the years, and I will miss Susan’s responsive presence in my literary and human world. This sad news, coming the day after the memorial for our friend in Dorset, has left my wife and myself more than a little shaken.

Clive

Like Clive, I met Susan and her daughter in 2013, only in our case the tea-shop of the BM, and also in 2015 when she was over for the silverpoint exhibition. After lunch near the theatre we went to see Richard the Second at the New Globe (and bumped into Aaron Poochigian outside.) I corresponded with her on a myriad of subjects from 2011 and also saw a lot of the Little Blue Man photos and early drafts of much of her work eventually published in magazines and then Frozen Charlotte to a wealth of good reviews.

The news in her emails grew darker from around mid-August but she managed an impressive Zoom presentation of her Hunger Winter poem on the 24th August when she was already ‘weak as a kitten, sick as a dog’. I last heard from her on September 26th when she had gone into hospital for a second time and the outlook was bleak.

Like Melissa, I am glad to have been in a position to publish around a dozen of her entertaining and witty pieces in Lighten Up On Online. She was so vital and warm life without her enthusiasm and interest in so many topics expressed in her often fun-filled emails will be drab indeed. She was an unforgettable person, who will be missed by all, including her beloved dogs Rachel and Reuben. My thoughts are with her family. Goodbye, dear Susan, God bless.

I saw the news on Facebook from her husband where she had befriended me. Like many of you I was shocked as I had no idea she was sick. I first met her here on a workshop Alex had set up, and then later at West Chester. I had enormous respect for her as a poet and treasured her wit and kindness. I will miss her very much.

Susan had Texas roots. Her (great?) grandfather, an immigrant, was a scientist and became a professor at Texas A&M. I can't imagine what life was like in College Station for a European Jew in the early 20th century, but Susan said he had a long professional life.

She was a good person. Really sad to hear this. Dark year.