Advance Praise for This small house, this big sky

The range of Maria Rouphail’s new book is delightful. What she invites into “her small house” of poetry is immense...everything under “this big sky.” Whether invoking scenes from the ancient prophet Jeremiah to describe our environmental damage or humorously remembering her family’s 1948 Ford, her free verse lines move with rhythmic life and imagery. Whether at dinner in a cafe in Philadelphia, “as tanks press toward Kyiv” or alone “lugging” her “petition up the root-snarled hill” to consult with trees, she takes us there.

—John Balaban, author of Passing Through a Gate

There is so much to cherish in Maria Rouphail’s abundant, elegant This small house, this big sky, a volume with the scope and authority of ethnography and the warmth and amplitude of genealogy. Perhaps, more than anything, however, its most alluring element is the plaintive, full-throated, prayerful song of a poet willing to take profound risks and wield unforgettable language to metamorphose the daily into the heightened sweep of epic, even opera. With unflinching precision, Rouphail escorts us from the cupboards of the kitchen to the plenitude of the cosmos. This is a yearning, powerful book.

— Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14)

& author of Light at the Seam

It’s rare to finish reading a book of poetry moved to tears by its entirety. This small house, this big sky is that rare book. Maria Rouphail writes with a woman’s sensibility—a daughter, mother, grandmother, and woman of faith—possessed by insistent memories and quaking fears for the future of civilization. Employing masterful command of poetic craft across a range of forms, Rouphail wrings beauty from each page: “mountains necklaced in cloud, / forests scarved with cobalt rivers, / a distant city gowned in lacteal air.” (“Toronto Travel Notes”). But it is the naked depth of the poet’s investment in her subjects which brought me to tears: “Listen to me lift my voice / on the street corner of my life” (“To My Mother and Father”).

—Joan Barasovska, author of Orange Tulips

“Listen to me lift my voice,” says Maria Rouphail at the start of her new collection, and these heartfelt poems merit our rapt attention. In language that shimmers and surprises, she converses with her beloved dead, seeking understanding and offering forgiveness, and also speaks of war, plague and what humans have done “beyond all mercy.” Persona poems give voice to the Feminine, including women in the Bible, saints, mothers in Gaza and Syria, and our own Mother Earth “wounded unto death.” Blazing through the darkness is the joy Rouphail finds in nature. With compassion, imagination, and skill, she beads her poems into a rosary for our broken world.

—Janis Harrington, author of How to Cut a Woman in Half

About the author

Maria Rouphail, PhD, is Senior Lecturer Emerita from North Carolina State University, where she taught courses in World Literature and where she also served as an academic adviser for the major in English. Poetry editor at The Main Street Rag and the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for Central North Carolina in 2024-25, Rouphail lives in Raleigh.