"One of five winners of the 1996 National Poetry Series (chosen by Deborah Digges) Mary Leader's poetry sets out to collect signatures left by the nooks and crannies of history: recipe cards, a self-starved man's last will, a schoolteacher's ditty. "An astonishing gift". -- Allen Grossman Deborah Digges selected this collection as a 1996 winner in the National Poetry Series. Digges wrote that Mary Leader's poetry sometimes reads like "an ancient text translated along the way by many anonymous scribes." I think I know what Digges is getting at: a sense that these words are at once so simple and so rich that they must have acquired their nuance from many years and many hands. Consider these lines from "Rife Sill": "Beyond the blue-green door, lovers laugh, oh they are / Jars of honey. A splash of sapphire emotes / Inside one of them, cast by a cobalt, diagonal pane." "Among Things Held at Arm's Length" is the standout poem. Former assistant state attorney general and then referee for the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, Leader now lectures in literature as well as law at Emory University. Her first book of poetry makes it clear that she is a highly intelligent poet with a fine ear and innovative intent. Leader is at her best when writing in a more-or-less traditional style, when the innovations of repetition and language-play occur within the confines of a traditional poetic structure. She is less successful with several visual poems (some with letters and words forming typographical borders for the poems themselves) and poems that attempt to emulate musical structures such as fugues or canons. Leader writes frequently of women struggling with body image, of unrequited love, jealousy, and family. Two of the strongest poems are about her children: "My Son Ted" ("His fingernails, and toenails, soft from the bath") and "Her Door," about her daughter ("I've bought her several thousand things to wear/ And now this boy buys her silver rings./ He goes inside her room and shuts the door"). A promising first collection with some gems and some puzzling works that nevertheless show a fierce determination to break into new poetic territory.?Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. “Mary Leader's book Red Signature is an astonishing gift. In it she cherishes, presents, gives back to everyone the brilliant common life that almost nobody but Mary Leader can see and make known. The poems are elegant, utterly without concealment and pride, open without hesitation or qualification to the great world. To read her book is to recover some part of the lost treasure of experience.” ― Allen Grossman “The cadences and silences of Red Signature are the work of a remarkably exacting listener. With its accomplished music, its generosity of feeling, and its witty, insightful love of the things of this world, Mary Leader's first book will delight and instruct any reader.” ― Susan Stewart “The best poems in this book are like looking at a great John Ford film: something elemental within American experience, something born in deprivation but capable of possessing grandeur, has found classic expression. See (perhaps best of all) 'Among Things Held at Arm's Length.' Mary Leader's book beautifully and eloquently recovers a world in the act of discovering her distance from it.” ― Frank Bidart "Mary Leader's book Red Signature is an astonishing gift. In it she cherishes, presents, gives back to everyone the brilliant common life that almost nobody but Mary Leader can see and make known. The poems are elegant, utterly without concealment and pride, open without hesitation or qualification to the great world. To read her book is to recover some part of the lost treasure of experience."--Allen Grossman "The cadences and silences of Red Signature are the work of a remarkably exacting listener. With its accomplished music, its generosity of feeling, and its witty, insightful love of the things of this world, Mary Leader's first book will delight and instruct any reader."--Susan Stewart "The best poems in this book are like looking at a great John Ford film: something elemental within American experience, something born in deprivation but capable of possessing grandeur, has found classic expression. See (perhaps best of all) 'Among Things Held at Arm's Length.' Mary Leader's book beautifully and eloquently recovers a world in the act of discovering her distance from it."--Frank Bidart Mary Leader makes her home in Norman, Oklahoma, and is currently the Creative Writing Fellow for Poetry at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, where she also lectures in law. Red Signature is her first book of poems. Mary Leader makes her home in Norman, Oklahoma, and is currently the Creative Writing Fellow for Poetry at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, where she also lectures in law. Red Signature is her first book of poems.