poetry

Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer

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9781627204378

There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away, the ones that told us we could only work as a nurse, teacher, secretary, or domestic servant. The ones that said we had to find a man, marry, have children, and then confine our labors to kids and kitchens.

We were left having to create our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. I read biographies of women artists, writers, and scientists looking for models.

My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world.

A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another: Libbie Custer (George Armstrong), Betsy Patterson Bonaparte (Jerome), Agnes Lake Hitchcock (Wild Bill), Annie Oakley, and others. She writes praise poems for Annette Funicello, her Aunt Alvina, and a clerk at Home Depot.

Imagination runs wild as she writes poems about having tea with Queen Elizabeth, a date with Richard Gere, and dancing with a museum guard. She even writes an “it” poem from the point of view of Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick.

Her ekphrastic poems—referencing the paintings that inspired them—remind us that the women depicted on these old canvases were real people, women who perhaps might like to exchange their ruffs and heavy skirts for a fuchsia gown with spaghetti straps. Daring, courageous, Shirley even does a takeoff on Rilke’s most famous poem.

She is a master at using humor in poetry. Many of these poems will make you chuckle and snort. But her passion is not only for glitz and glamour. Her elegies to people we know and those we didn’t until now hurt our hearts and remind us that we mourn together. Her empathy will not surprise anyone who has read her collection After Words, a series of poems on the 2010 stabbing death of Stephen Pitcairn, an aspiring doctor.

The brave poems in this collection define one woman’s way of being in the world. It is a way we can all appreciate and applaud and find ourselves in. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

What poet’s work have you read recently that ignited your imagination?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

This Earth, This Body, by Arlene Iris Distler

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This new collection of poems embodies a way of being in this world. Bursting with generosity of spirit, Distler’s poems call us to appreciate even the smallest of joys and to have courage in dark times. (Full disclosure: The author is a friend and colleague of mine). She reminds us of “Rain . . . beating jazz on my roof” and of the “imperfect fruit” of an old apple tree near where a loved one’s ashes are scattered.

Distler does not shy away from the big questions, starting with a brilliant poem entitled “Remember dying.” Upon the untimely death of her husband, Distler must find a way to comprehend that eternal mystery.

We are not this flesh we call ourselves . . .
this seeming solid self only the sounding bell.

Yet the world’s beauty is ours
to bear, and the austere does not call.

Her poems call to all our senses and all our philosophies, urging us to grasp life and to let it go.

She explores the uses of memory. There are poems about a childhood charm bracelet, an old yearbook, and a grandmother, only now seeing that the elderly woman may have been lost in “the long ago passage/between old world and new.” In one poem Distler revisits the early home shared with her husband, “where the seeds of my children were sown/among clover and high grass.” With powerful imagery she reveals what remains:

there’s only a burnt and bruised shell
yellow jackets in the cellar hole
chimney the only thing standing.
And the sky, as usual
brooding and hallowed.

The New England landscape is here, with its stone walls, blueberries, and pond peepers. In her hands, the natural world with its splendor and cruelty yields startling insights such as this when an owl “haughty as ice” seems to speak:

. . . Remember your nest
that spot you tend with bits of wood,
tufts of straw, feathers
you pluck from your breast.

There are sacrifices we make and stands we take. We experience love and loss, and—if we’re lucky—learn to see with new eyes. This collection brings together the moments of human experience in poems that surprise us on every page.

Whose poetry are you reading these days?

Best Books I Read in 2022

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

Dear Suzanne, by Eve Rifkah

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I’ve read this slim volume several times and will probably continue to reread it. Rifkah alternates poems in the voice of artist Suzanne Valadon with prose sections by a present-day narrator, apparently Rifkah herself, that read like prose poems. Together they create a multi-faceted portrait of what it means to be an artist, a mother, wife, granddaughter, lover.

In summoning the spirit of Suzanne Valadon, Rifkah explores what it means to be a woman and an artist, unappreciated, known mostly for her work as a model for artists like Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Berthe Morisot. Rifkah imagines how Suzanne herself might have described her sacrifices for her husband André Utter and damaged son Maurice Utrillo V, both artists, Maurice being better-known than Suzanne until recently.

Grandmother and Grandson the last painting of Madeleine
age 79….her mind wrapped in superstitious wandering.
Her face turned away from Maurice
away from love shredded by madness
……….they suffer each other in ache
captured by daughter and mother
a trinity tied in paint *

This poem, which ends with Madeleine’s death, is followed by Rifkah’s description of her own mother’s death. By combining Suzanne’s voice with her own, intertwining their stories, generating resonances, Rifkah has created a stunning exploration of a multitude of family relationships.

Yet Rifkah also goes beyond this handful of lives to look at the freedom sought by an artist. Like Suzanne who did not change her name with marriage, Rifkah discards her father’s and husband’s name, “becoming me alone. We change our name to change the road we travel from birth.”

I appreciate the need to define your own life, free of society’s plan for you, having come of age during feminism’s second wave when all the old models for a woman’s life went out the window and we had to create our own.

Back then, I read biographies of women artists and writers, looking for ideas. Now I read them with appreciation for the difficulty of the task. Rifkah examines the deep urges that motivate an artist, whether of words or paint, even when you see your intensely imagined works outsold by others’ scenes that are taken home by tourists “to say they’d seen Paris.”

When my model leaves
fingers still tingle
……….brushes stay fast to my hand
like the girl in the story dancing in enchanted shoes
until feet cut off

Read this book to learn about Valadon. Read it to learn about being an artist. Read it for the pleasure of the lines and sentences.

Have you ever read a novel or biography in verse?

*Note that the dots are meant to indicate spaces.

The Marvelous Bones of Time, by Brenda Coultas

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Driving around the neighborhood with my mother and sister, they would sometimes point out a house and talk about who lived there now, who used to live there, where the children ended up, and other remembered stories. We had to drive slowly since they knew and had known so many people. Besides being fun for them, the conversation helped our aging mother exercise her memory.

When I sold my house, the new buyers wanted to know about its history and everyone who had lived there before me. The latter was easy, since I had bought it from the original owners.

I often find myself thinking about, not just a house, but a piece of land and what secret history it holds. We are, after all, only borrowing this spot for now. We, too, will pass on and may or may not be remembered or sensed by those who next walk here.

In this poetry collection, subtitled Excavations and Explanations, Coultas explores that concept further in the first of its two parts. Titled The Abolition Journals (or, Tracing the Earthworks of My County), this section is about the liminal space between past and present: finding flints and arrowheads, tracing what it means to grow up in Lincoln’s land. She says, “I knew someone, an ironworker, who could point out burial and village sites in the river bottoms.”

The author also looks at the meagre boundary separating the two states her life straddles.

Looking from the free state
there is a river then a slave state
Turn around and there is a slave state,
a river
then a free state

In the second part, A Lonely Cemetery, she searches out the ghosts of these and other places. The title poem notes that it is After a line by Pablo Neruda. To Neruda’s line “There are lonely cemeteries” she adds “and there are cemeteries that wish to be alone so they send out ghosts.” In some poems she speaks for those ghosts while in others she recounts various supernatural experiences, her own and those of others: a halo around photos of a man who later survives the attack on the World Trade Center, an old woman who “was a daylight person, which is a living person who has become lost or passed into a portal,” UFOs, and an alien abduction.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this second part. Many—if not all—of us have had strange experiences. Driving in LA one day, my sister suddenly saw a person appear, touching the hood of her car before seeming to be mown down. There was no one there, but a block later, as she shakily and slowly continued to drive, a man stepped out in front of her and she was able to stop in time. I myself have twice stumbled upon places I had only seen before in dreams.

Yet I cannot say I believe in these paranormal happenings. I respect them and note them and set them aside.

The first part was more interesting to me, with its poems about the author’s native Indiana, wrestling with the history of slavery. Coultas makes interesting use of white space here, especially effective given the erasure of slaves’ names and history. The poems also wrestle with history itself, what is remembered, what buried thing is found, what no longer exists.

Some of the poems about Kentucky across the river, where a branch of her family lives, seemed odd to me, particularly the one recounting jokes making fun of Kentuckians. She says:

What did I learn about my kinfolk?
Petroglyphs mostly
divided as the bluegrass

I came across this book when I was giving a reading at a bookstore in Annapolis with my friend Shirley. Attracted by the title, I pulled it out of the stack and was entranced by its cover, which features a child who looks like one of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls. I bought it without even looking inside. Yes, I’m a reader who is seduced by titles and covers. Sometimes it’s good to be surprised.

Have you ever selected a book based on its title alone? What is the most intriguing title you’ve come across?

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown

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I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal.

Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words.

He uses enjambment more fiercely than I would have thought could work, and by doing so, introduces ambiguity. The end of each unfinished line introduces a gap that invites the reader to leap across it, as Robert Bly described in Leaping Poetry. The reader’s mind begins to fill in what comes next, only to get to the next line and find it something else entirely. Here are the first lines of “Second Language:”

You come with a little
Black string tied
Around your tongue,
Knotted to remind
Where you came from
And where you left
Behind photographs
Of people whose
Names now buck
Pronouncing . . .

Constantly being pulled up like this as we form sentences in our head reinforces the ideas in the poem. It also introduces what Donald Maass terms micro-tension, irresistibly drawing the reader forward. Plus the original thought lingers, a soft echo sounding through the poem.

Brown creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity. Some poems are in invented stanza forms, invented indentations, all of which carry meaning. The most outstanding are in the form Brown created: the Duplex. It combines sonnet and ghazal forms: fourteen lines in couplets, where the first line of the couplet is the last line–more or less–of the previous couplet, and the last line of the last couplet is the first line of the poem. Couplets two, four, and six are indented.

Such a form should be impossibly repetitive, but in Brown’s hands each Duplex is an experience like no other: the subtle changes between repetitions, the force of the ideas, and the return at the end, the words the same but the meaning irrevocably changed.

I’m struck by the physicality of these poems. Brown gets at emotion through our bodies, reminding me of Resmaa Menakem’s nonfiction book My Grandmother’s Hands where he locates what Wendell Berry called this country’s Hidden Wound in White and Black bodies, in the trauma held there. See for example these first lines from “Correspondence:”

I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
I had to go back this far in order
To present myself as a whole being
You’d heed and believe in . . .

These poems are all infused with love, even when they are exploring heartache or calling out injustice. Capturing the currents that have been roiling out society in the last few years, and before, the poems may rock you, as they did me, but you will still feel cradled by the love.

What poems astonish you?

Out of Wonder, by Kwame Alexander

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Subtitled Celebrating Poets and Poetry, this marvelous collection is suitable for all ages. The poems, written by Alexander, Chris Colderley, and Marjory Wentworth, are supplemented with stunning illustrations by Ekua Holmes.

Like all great poems, each contains many layers. Young children, including my preschooler grandchildren, can enjoy the music of the words and universal subjects, such as this homage to Robert Frost by Wentworth which begins:

In every season I have wandered
on paths that wind through fields and woods . . .

Older children and adolescents will see themselves, too, in poems ranging from the celebration of Rumi to the tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks.

Walk out of your room
beneath the morning sky;
let the sun enter your heart,
. . .
Make a song from the light
falling through the air,
and dance even when
you are alone . . .

—from “Spin a Song,” by Marjory Wentworth

Bronzeville lady
Way past cool
Voice like butter
Melting blues . . .

—from “Hue and Cry,” by Kwame Alexander

Older teens and adults will thrill to the intricate construction of the book. In the first of three parts, the authors contribute works written using the style and rhythm of the selected poet. In the second part, the poems “incorporate the feelings and themes” of each poet. The last part, titled Thank You, includes poems about the poet being honored, such as this one celebrating William Carlos Williams that begins:

the hurried days
of two lives
crammed
into one

a modest man
in Rutherford
New Jersey
a doctor poet . . .

—from “No Idle Days,” by Chris Colderley

I find it hard to imagine the courage necessary to take on this threefold challenge, and applaud the authors not only for taking it on but for accomplishing it so brilliantly.

Older readers will also enjoy the secret notes in the colorful illustrations, unnoticed at first but when seen add yet more layers to the poem, such as this one celebrating Chief Dan George where a forest scene holds rocks and rivers, swirling leaves and woodland creatures, including the poet.

. . . Listen to the rivers,
the raven’s song,
the woodpecker’s knock,
and your beating heart.

Walk softly, mind
the leaves dancing
in shaky hands
of an old maple . . .

—from “For Our Children’s Children,” by Chris Colderley

The book is designed to introduce readers of all ages to these twenty poets and their work, inspiring us to explore more of their work, and that of other poets. I heartily recommend it.

What book has made you want to read more about the subject?

Best Books I Read in 2021

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo.

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This is the book I needed right now. At this moment, a significant portion of my fellow citizens—including some friends and family—seem to have lost their minds, willing to destroy the country. For some it is the pursuit of ephemeral power, money and/or fame; for others, to be generous, it is out of fear. My astonishment and dismay know no bounds.

Now, at this moment, Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through. (Full disclosure: I know the author slightly.) From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts.

I especially need a poem like “A Brief Explanation of the Psychotic Universe” which begins:

This is how it works: the invisible
cause and effect of the universe,
that Big Bang no one has ever heard,
emits its waves of singular commands.

The poem gives voice to someone who quite reasonably explains their own experience, someone who is perhaps psychotic, but also kind and compassionate, wanting to help others. That’s what I must remember: to see the whole person.

Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity. Maybe we all have “a black wolf / which was once your shadow” lurking in our past. We all want to be treated with respect, no matter how strange our choices and compulsions may appear to others.

Poetry is music and the language here is undeniably musical. Throughout, Mayo’s language is both direct and complex. There are no obscure words or allusions that you have to look up. Yet in crafting these lines, using internal and slant rhyme, repeated sounds such as the “v” in the stanza quoted above, Mayo creates a rhythm all his own.

The poems in this collection explore the liminal space between oneself and others, the negotiations that must take place in that unsettled region where our own rules and certainties may not apply, where we must recognise what the other brings.

And sometimes the other may be ourselves, past or present. One of my favorite poems is “Pressure Cooker” where Mayo goes deeply into an incident from childhood, using a child’s language, building details until the devastating last stanza which opens the poem to encompass multitudes.

I love that Mayo goes after what Brian Doyle calls Big Ideas, unafraid to bring his lens—up close and personal—to concepts that might seem impossible to address in a single poem. Yet he succeeds. My favorite poem is “The Ladder” which uses details to bring us so vividly into the experience of climbing that physical and metaphorical ladder, and ends unexpectedly with something so simple, so profound that it is impossible to forget.

What poem has helped you face the day?

The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente

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Sometimes I think: there are only 26 letters; there are only so many words, so many ways to combine them. And then a chapbook like this comes along and blows me away. Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh, summoning my own experiences to reinforce her ideas and acknowledge her insight. (Full disclosure: I know the author slightly.)

“I Was a Pencil” is one of the best poems I’ve read about becoming a writer. Describing a childhood Halloween costume she speaks of “the finest 2-word poem I’d even heard: / Venus / Velvet” before talking of being able to

. . . run
from house to house

since I had no baggage
unlike my sisters,
the witch and the princess.

So much meaning about women and women’s roles and writing is held within these few words.

I was also aware, on my second or third reading, of the exquisite care taken with the ordering of the poems. Attention has clearly been paid to the way poems on facing pages converse with each other, harmonise and expand on each other’s thoughts, such as putting an erotic poem about the wind facing a poem about the transcendent experience of a flute concert.

My favorite poem is “Rural Essay.” As someone newly settled in the Green Mountains, I have struggled with capturing what they mean to me. And here she has expressed it so clearly, so cleanly that it eases the pain and frustration that have dogged me.

It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

Sometimes there is a hinge in the middle of a poem; sometimes a twist at the end. Each poem has something that suddenly takes it out of the mundane, magnifying it into a larger truth, whether it’s the slap of a beaver’s tale breaking a marital stalemate or the echo of a lady’s slipper flower in the story of Cinderella.

You can tell right away from the cover, a simple line drawing by Valente, that you are in the presence of someone who can fill a plain vessel with multitudes of meaning. For me, this drawing is an exultant person, arms thrown wide in the movement my Qigong teacher calls Love Descends on Me, and overhead a bird, free and certain in its flight.

What poem have you read that has surprised or humbled you, or told you something about yourself?