Poems from the Southern States
Selected by
Jill Breckenridge, Guest Editor
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The poems that were submitted to the Southern States contest were grounded in the wisdom that comes only with age and experience. They were varied, moving, and formally inventive—they often sang on the page.
Subjects ranged from childhood memories, to children, grandchildren, and partners. Some poems confronted illness and the challenge of death—our own or those we love. Often travel inspired wonderful poems, and nature always provided the balm that comforts and heals.
I was reminded over and over again what gifts we, as women and as poets, bring to this world. The most difficult part of my task was to select only three winning poems and nine others to receive special notice. The easiest part was to experience life through the eyes of the talented women who shared their poems with me.
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Sue Walker
(First Prize) |
Grandfather’s Thumb
She said
her grandfather’s thumb
was a chapter in the story
of his life, a black digit,
a hammer with which
he sometimes hit the nail,
sometimes not. She remembers
once when she was a child,
she reached out and touched it,
wondering how something ugly
could be a part of something
she loved. She said Grandpa
told her the thumb was hard labor,
and she thought he was tough—
but he was also trips to the bakery,
cream puffs and macaroons;
he was pink grapefruit
served with brown sugar
and games of checkers
on summer afternoons,
the hours they spent together. Grown now,
she says she is nails and a hammer too,
blueberry pie and coconut cake,
and the thumb that hits the space key
of a computer when she writes;
she is poem and story, and the digit
that is a chapter in the story of her life.
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Ann Fisher-Wirth
(Second Prize)
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Ecce
(traveling with friends in the south of France)
All day we hiked the gorge, descending boulders,
weaving in and out among pines and heather,
the twining yellow butterflies and limeade-
colored lizards. And the child in the Tribune
we’d skimmed while eating breakfast—
this child in the photo in Baghdad sun
watched the hanged men twisting slowly,
she peered out from around the crowd’s legs,
her mother nowhere near, she had been sent
to buy bread, perhaps, or she was on her way
to school, and stumbled on the plaza where they
hold their executions. All day as I climbed
through dusty sunlight or rested for lunch,
pitting apricots, tearing and munching baguettes,
I thought of this child, remembering the California
bookstore where once I crouched over a book
of lynchings published by SNCC, gazed shamed
and transfixed at the page where men with dogs
on choke hold and lank-haired women pressed
around their quarry hanging ragged from a tree—
crouched in the bookstore in my soft orange ruana
and hippie beads I breathed, my lungs rising and falling—
and a kid, his face bleached by the flash,
grinned over his shoulder at the photographer.
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Joan Mazza
(Third Prize)
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Joan Mazza
(Third Prize)
First Hard Freeze
In late afternoon, I take my buckets to the garden
to harvest the last basil, tomatoes, peppers,
and two full pails of young rapini.
I replay our hike yesterday on Skyline Drive
through fall foliage to Stone Man Trail,
photos of berries, mountains, colors of autumn.
Photo after photo of gray-green lichens—
a puzzling fascination. Marriage of fungus
with algae in thousands of combinations,
worldwide, used for dyes, medicines and food
in famine. So different, yet symbiotic, the pair
gets along in hardest times. All day, through our drive
and climb, we talked of couples we know who struggle
to stay together, and our connection.
From a seat on a sunny bank, we watched
a walking stick nearly invisible in brown oak leaves
and grass. For lunch, egg salad on homemade bread,
yellow tomatoes and cucumbers in Asian dressing.
Your partner of fifteen years no longer joins us.
At my kitchen sink, I wash and drain the greens.
Between the potted parsley and zebra plant,
I watch leaves swirl down to the mossy ground.
Change. Going inward. The scent of frying garlic
and steamed rapini recalls dinners in Brooklyn,
my parents and sister, at the blonde wood table
in the narrow dinette. My given family, who loved
this dark rapini— Sicilian goodness with a bitter edge.
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Gail Peck
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Fountain with Six Children
After Robert Capa, photograph,
Stalingrad, 1947
Ghostly, these marble children
on a pedestal, holding hands,
circling an alligator whose jaws
I can’t see. They must have
been singing a song when bombs
fell. Stairways leading nowhere
in the background. How
did this fountain remain intact,
this large funny frog
with eyes atop its head
looking straight at me,
other frogs spaced
an equal distance apart?
If I knew Russian I would sing,
and these children would kick
up their heels and dance.
There’s only a trickle of water left,
so the frogs can’t jump
in, and nowhere for my
wishful coin to sink. A woman
sits on a park bench facing
the fountain. She wears a scarf
in the August heat, and is waiting
for her barefooted daughter,
the one dancing in the swirling skirt.
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Margaret S. Mullins
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Word Magnet
She is two, and words fly in and out.
Verbs tumble and spill,
pronouns get sorted and stored
as she scuffles through dry leaves,
pigtails coming undone.
Me roll down hill higher.
Sounds and concepts swirl and are pulled in,
rearranged, tied together
and sent sailing back out
as she covers her Hermie doll with pine needles,
tucking her in with a kiss.
Go sleep now, Hermie. I ride merry-go-chicken. Oh, man.
Little room for nuance, little need;
subtlety will come later, with secrets.
For now, present tense trumps participles
as she climbs back up the tunnel slide
and corkscrews back down, long legs leading.
Wheee! Me want more olives. Run home now, OK?
She grabs words, flips them over, tosses them back
and folds them into her fantasy play
as she points at a garbage can and announces solemnly
that she lives there. Then she laughs and dances away
into a field of adjectives.
Hermie cool baby. Me love pink Hermie.
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Rand Silverbear Hall
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Southern State
oh my beloved south
where the hair pin turns
are tighter than my ass
as the side of the road opens
to a sheer mountain drop
bald knob, white face, cedar mountain
devils kitchen
where 15 MPH means it
roads wrapped in foliage
open suddenly to reveal
a horizon of mountain crests
stretching up from the earth
like a sleeping woman's curves
and even at mid-day
the mist snuggles deep in her valleys
i went out west
to new mexico’s orange and blue
but shrunk in that land infertile
without "life support"
god forsaken... i ached
to come home to the south
green and alive.
forest so dense
it tries to eat the road
trees breaking through the rock
every inch bursting
with life and water
lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, waterfalls
and rich damp soil
maple, oak, tulip, beech and birch
pines reaching for the sky
seem to grow as i watch
the road clings
to the mountain’s side
wraps around her curves
slips deep into her moist hollows
before climbing to the crest
the valley opens
drawing the breath from my lungs
my eyes to distant hills
while wildflowers and mountain laurel
say “don’t look so far away”
stay
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Nancy Calhoun
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The Fog
You’ve tried to tell me how it is for you, my love,
this fog you say has folded round your agile brain
and I try to imagine how it must feel to struggle
to retrieve a simple memory.
That day in San Francisco when fog
obscured the most familiar landmarks
as though they never were,
everything remained the same as in the sun
but near invisible, and I had to conjure the reality,
my mind retrieving the last known vision of the bridge,
the tower, the bay, all still there but gone.
Do you remember our camping trips in the desert,
the night we shed our sleeping bags
to lie under the stars and didn’t sleep,
afraid we’d miss the constellations’ path?
Can you still recall the night in Iceberg Canyon
when Luciano filled the dark with high C’s
that bounced from canyon wall to canyon wall?
Yesterday you told me that when you woke
you could not remember my name for a moment
and I was terrified that what has lurked in shadows
has now begun to skulk into the light, to steal
our careful equilibrium, carry away what is left
of our loving connection on dusty moth-wings
Your memory invaded by the destroying fog,
your brilliance shrouded in a blur I cannot penetrate.
What shall I do while we wait — shall I search
in dark corners and behind doors and brandish a stick
or a broom, perhaps fight a duel with the damned fog?
Or shall we squeeze life and truth from every moment,
saving grief for later, always later, but not now?
I will never be ready to remember alone.
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Merimée Moffitt
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My Boy
Bright snow our nest, trudging to the outhouse
Piñon fires, wooly wet things
Our abundance all we had, the two of us
Then life split open like a nut and you were
My grief beyond reason, the middle season of
Childhood stolen; I am sorry
All I could give and some damn blackbird
Snatched you and brought you back broken
The best he could do
I would comb through evidence
Your truculent nature lit a blind trail
Mountains, ponds, rivers, air
Did I think burning the tablet would remove
Pages lived already, strange rooms, cold cars
No comedy seduces me to forget
This story
It is me, this story, it is
Enough lesson for a life
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Barbara Rockman
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What Grief Isn’t
My grief is not a lake
nor ducks arrival in mist
morning’s slow glimmer
out of which sails rise
miniature and moonlike
It is not the dock
nor the deep end from which
I am invited to dive into
cold springs nor
flesh unready to be stunned
nor the rough bottom
the feet too tender nor is it
the surface of sheen and glisten
the lustered air
mist of our undoing
off-lake and ambient It is not
the old wooden swing’s rope
blister and splinter-ridden
to which we do not come
gloved or loose gripped
nor is grief the hammock
unprepared for our weight
nor the trees like arms held out
unfilled uphill from the riffled
shore which is neither sorrow nor night
Grief is not the sun flashing
the long-eyed glass house
nor morning’s soft focus
nor can the ducks floating out
to the lake’s calm center
surrender to it nor
the boats’ wakes
etched upon
its reflection of low purple hills
define it as if the house
mirrored on the surface
will imprint itself
as if water is
impermeable and forever
as grief
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Diana Pinckney
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Sometimes Trees
anchored and riddled, trust
brittle limbs
to wind. Relentless blue
darkens, the cracked
earth opening
with rain. Some afternoons
failing light goes
mad, explodes
in outrageous red, bleeds
into rose, lavender
finally unfurling
above the living and the living
dead. Some nights,
the sky’s black holes,
sad old ghosts, consent
to be consumed by stars.
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Jane Ellen Glasser
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Tour Guide in the Musée du Louvres
La Grand Odalisque by Ingres
It’s the torso we see first, its languid,
sweeping curve that lures us in. Let critics
argue the deformation of the arm,
the extra vertebrae, the too small head;
the body’s seduction is no less perfect.
The rondure of the breast, the buttocks
are like ripe fruit beckoning to be taken.
Dressed in a jeweled turban and bracelets,
she holds a peacock fan, its many eyes,
against her thigh. As if to repeat a theme,
we’re next drawn to her gaze—aloof—
as if years of harem life have worn her down.
Imagine holding this pose for hours...
Maybe it’s the end of a day and she’s masking
a stiff neck, the chill of a drafty studio, hunger,
restlessness. Or perhaps she’s just taken
a toke of opium from the hookah by her feet,
withdrawn to a foreign place we cannot reach.
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Margery Cunningham
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Haying
Sixty years ago I did something like this.
I remember small triangular blades
scissoring along an arm flung down.
The tall elegant grasses fell
in slow motion as a horse pulled me by.
This time I sit on a John Deere
pulling a flat whirling blade
that grinds through baby palmettos,
thistles with startling fuchsia topknots.
Cowbirds follow the widening cut.
Not so graceful, the chore still ends
in smaller and smaller rectangles.
One last pass. I hope my life ends
with the same feeling: There, I’m done,
you can see for yourself.
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Jill Breckenridge
(from The Gravity of Flesh)
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Contour Line Drawing
Our thumbs the first model, we move
a pen around them on the page,
really seeing for the first time
knuckle hills, the plowed furrows
stretched across them, white half-
moons shining above thumbnail
skies, our finished work ancient
as the first hands drawn centuries
ago on a cave wall by firelight.
After the hijacked plane crashed
in the reaped field, they found
two hands bound at the wrists.
Now we draw our whole hand, lying
on its back, curled fingers reaching
toward us, as in sleep or death.
Two people jumped from the flaming
towers, cartwheeled all the way down
through smoke and ash holding hands.
We trace the second finger pointing
toward the unknown, try to catch
the palm’s curve, its maze of destiny.
Next we trace the lifeline, its deep
groove dark in the innocent hand,
the line a palm reader measures
to gladly announce a long life ahead,
or looks down to mask her expression
for a lesser truth than what she sees.
The chef, a hundred floors up, chopped
beets, the window washer squeegeed,
and a broker wrote in her day planner
as they took their secrets with them,
their delights and lies, failures
and dreams, years they hadn’t lived.
Those who were lost return to dwell
in the negative space between our fingers,
their faces barely imprinted on our palms,
cupped to hold treasure we took for granted
until it was so lost that even our hands
holding photographs couldn’t find it.
"Contour Line Drawing" by Jill Breckenridge from The Gravity of Flesh © Nodin Press, 2009.
(Available at www.Amazon.com.)
Jill Breckenridge won The Bluestem Award, judged by William Stafford, for her book of personal poems, How To Be Lucky. Her sequence of poetry and prose about the Civil War, Civil Blood, published by Milkweed Editions, was nominated for the American Library Association's Notable Books of the year. Her awards include Loft-McKnight Writers' Awards in both creative prose and poetry, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and two State Arts Board Grants. Her latest book of poems, The Gravity of Flesh, came out in 2009, and her memoir, Miss Priss and the Con Man, will be published in 2010.
www.JillBreckenridge.com
Nancy Calhoun has come to poetry in recent years. Her first love was music, and she sandwiched in a semi-professional life as a concert and opera singer while raising four children. In 2006 she retired from a career in corporate America and moved with her husband to a small town in Arizona. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and Nancy turned to writing to help deal with the emotions of their new challenge. Her work has also appeared in Camroc Press Review. She is publishing a chapbook this fall entitled Sip Wine, Drink Stars.
Margery Cunningham was born on Tybee Island, Georgia, and immediately boarded a banana boat for the Panama Canal Zone, spending the next 40 years as a military dependent of one sort or another. She has published children’s stories, magazine articles, book reviews, and poetry. For the past ten years she has been on the editorial board of White Pelican Review, a poetry magazine, and is currently organizing some of her own poems into a book entitled Gulf Wars and Other Forays into Human Frailty.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems, Carta Marina, appeared from Wings Press in April 2009. She is the author of Blue Window and Five Terraces, and of the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows (forthcoming). She is co-editing an anthology of contemporary ecopoetry to be published by Trinity University Press. She has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.
Jane Ellen Glasser's poetry has appeared in Hudson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Virginia Quarterly, Southern Review and Georgia Review, among others. A first collection of her poetry, Naming the Darkness, included an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass. A second book, Light Persists, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry 2005. She co-founded the New Virginia Review, Inc. and currently serves as poetry editor for the new journal, Lady Jane’s Miscellany.
Rand (Silverbear) Hall
After 13 years as editor and publisher of the Gazette, the Suncoast Gay & Lesbian News Magazine, she retired to enjoy life in a rural lesbian community on Lookout Mountain.
Her poetry has been published in Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives, Voices in the Night, The Butch Cookbook, and many lesbian journals. She has been part of Womonwrites, the Southeastern Lesbian Writers' Conference, since its beginning in 1979. She now walks the Red Road.
Jan Maher's publications include the novel Heaven, Indiana (Dog Hollow Press) and one-act plays Intruders and Ismene; Most Dangerous Women: Bringing History to Life through Readers' Theater (including the play Most Dangerous Women co-authored with Nikki Nojima Louis); and History in the Present Tense: Engaging Students through Inquiry and Action (co-authored with Douglas Selwyn). She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Union Institute and University, and teaches writing, learning theory, human development, and curriculum methods in teacher education programs. She divides her time between Plattsburgh, NY and Seattle, WA.
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, sex therapist, writing coach, and seminar leader. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam 1998). Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Möbius, Slipstream, Timber Creek Review, The MacGuffin, Writer’s Digest, Playgirl, and other places. Her chapbook "Mom’s Little Destruction Book" was runner-up twice in the Permafrost Contest, and her poem, "When We Were Students" won first prize in the Skyline Magazine Summer Poetry Contest, 2007. She now writes poetry full-time in rural central Virginia. www.JoanMazza.com
Merimée Moffitt, a West Coast ex-pat, has lived in New Mexico since 1970. She has taught every age level from infant to college and now devotes herself to poetry and prose, husband, friends, reading, cooking, gardening, and good health. She has poems forthcoming in Pemmican and New Mexico Poetry Review, and has been published recently in Fourth Genre and the Harwood Anthology. She is co-editor of a poetry broadside, The Rag, and co-hosts a monthly open mic at her home in Albuquerque.
Margaret S. Mullins splits her time between the quiet of rural Maryland and the rumpus of downtown Baltimore. Her work has appeared in Prairie Poetry, Loch Raven Review, Welter, New Voice News, Manorborn, Sun, and Chesapeake Reader. She is the editor of Manorborn 2009.
Gail Peck holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her first chapbook won the North Carolina Harperprints Award, and her first full-length book won the Texas Review Breakthrough Contest. Main Street Rag published Foreshadow and Thirst. Her most recent chapbook is From Terezin. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Brevity, Cave Wall, and in numerous other journals. She was a 2007 finalist for Nimrod’s 2007 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and a 2008 semi-finalist. Peck’s work has also been highly anthologized, most recently in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery.
Diana Pinckney has published poetry and prose in Iodine, Green Mountains Review, Atlanta Review, Calyx, Cream City Review, Main Street Rag, Cave Wall, and other journals and anthologies. She has three collections of poetry: Fishing with Tall Women, Winner of the South Carolina Kinloch Rivers Contest and North Carolina Persephone Press Book Award; White Linen, Nightshade Press; and Alchemy, Main Street Rag Publishing Co. She is presently teaching at the Cornwell Center in Charlotte, NC.
Barbara Rockman teaches poetry at Santa Fe Community College and in private workshops in the Santa Fe, NM area. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Calyx, Kalliope, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quiddity, and other journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of the anthology, Women Becoming Poems (Cinabar Press). Her collection, Sting and Nest, is forthcoming from Sunstone Press.
Sue Brannan Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press. Sue has published 6 books of poetry and numerous critical articles on James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. She is completing a critical book: The Chiastic Deep Ecology of James Dickey. Another book of poetry is due out in 2010.
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Comments
Diana Pinckney
13 Nov 2009, 16:47
Since September,I have loved these poems, reading and rereading them to
gain more insight into their beauty and richness each time.
Thank all of you for your beautiful work. Ann Fisher-With -- your stunning
combination of beauty & horror with the child's discovery & loss of
innocence. Takes me back to E. Bishop's In the Waiting Room.
And Sue Walker, I love that magic thumb and all it contains. Wonderful
rhythm in your language, too.
Nancy Calhoun's lovely images, the haunting fog and last line stay with me
the way Gail Peck's fountain, mother & daughter images do.
And so many other things to savor in this fine group of poems that I'm so
honored to be a part of.
Thank you all and especially Jill and Nan. Your website needs Kudos, also
-- very well done and readable. I will continue to enjoy.
Heather McPherson
03 Nov 2009, 18:50
Nancy Calhoun's poem brought tears to my eyes. Exact, moving imagery I can
relate to, with my son's father diagnosed Alzheimers and Auckland in winter
a city of sea-mists that disappears everything into what might be memory
and what might be infinity.
Warmest regards to the poet. HMcP
Margaret Adkins
20 Oct 2009, 10:08
I enjoyed reading every thing.
But my first love is Poems that Rhythm.
When will you have those?
Lynnel Jones
20 Oct 2009, 09:57
Splendid poems - taking me back to the years we spent on the VA/NC border.
One standout for me is Gail Peck's Fountain With Six Children: masterful
line breaks trickling out words like the trickling fountain of
ramifications for the frog and wishful coin, the scarved mother as stuck as
the coin - her swirling daughter, barefoot and leaping leaping the frog.
The other stand out is Diana Pinkney's Sometimes Trees. I love the
formlessness of the "sometimes" phrases roving within the tight pattern of
the tercets. Fine ending punch free of all form. Congratulations!
Gail Peck
09 Oct 2009, 13:24
Sue, Congratulations on winning Persimmon Tree's Contest! I am honored to
be included with all these talented women. Yes, you selected one of my
poems long, long ago for Negative Capability. I have a ms. of mostly
ekphrastic poems, and yes, they must stand alone without the artwork. But
much can be found on the internet.
Sue Walker
27 Sep 2009, 17:42
It is quite an experience--reading through this marvelous collection of
poetry. I am astounded by the keen poetic eye of all of the poets and the
masterful description.
Merimée Moffett's startling "weathering" account -- and the last lines that
startle and stun.
I love the very simple title: "My Boy" that makes the ending of the poem
breathtaking and unforgettable.
Sue Walker
22 Sep 2009, 00:00
"I will never be ready to remember alone."
"The Fog" is achingly beautiful, tender, lovely, sad.
What a fantastic analogy -- comparing San Francisco's fog to losing memory,
losing self. And I love the flashback to camping trips in the desert.
And the poem presents a desert of a different kind.
This poem also offers ready tears.
Sue Walker
21 Sep 2009, 23:51
Rand Silverbear Hall's poem, "Southern State" "draws breath from my lungs."
Her writining about nature takes the reader into the "heart" of the South
she loves.
This "litany," this "list" is masterful -- though not less so than the
entire poem:
every inch bursting
with life and water
lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, waterfalls
and rich damp soil
maple, oak, tulip, beech and birch
pines reaching for the sky
When I leave the near swampland of the Mobile Tensaw Delta, it s cypress
trees with gnarled knees, the grey-moss hanging hair, the moist mush of
relentless rain, I travel with her north around those hairpin curves, and I
look up "To" the mountain that is not my home though she shows me it says
"welcome" and "stay awhile."
This is a gorgeously sensual poem with richly evocative language.
I think this poem--and the other marvelous poems in this collection tell us
that we are women who know how to nest, pull up roots, make our way, our
homes.
Mary Kay Rummel
21 Sep 2009, 20:00
These poems are moving, real, and beautifully crafted.
Nancy Calhoun
20 Sep 2009, 13:19
Must mention in particular that Diana Pinckney's Sometime Trees stirred me
so. It was like reading a painting.
And Barbara Rockman's What Grief Isn't was a deep plunge into tender
emotions.
I've read both of these several times, always gaining new insights.
Nancy Calhoun
20 Sep 2009, 13:09
Nan and Jill and all those who make this wonderful publication possible: I
am so honored to be included in this issue. Such accomplished and talented
writers/poets cast so much light on the path! Thank you all.
Sue Walker
20 Sep 2009, 10:00
Margaret Mulliln's "Word Magnet" not just because it is an excellent poem
-- with its gift of two-year-old language -- but also because it resonates
with this grandmother whose grandaughter will be 2 on the 5th of November.
I love the sense of observation and the play of language that brings it the
richness of a two-year-old's vocabulary.
I'm going to see my almost 2-year-old in early October -- and I want to be
alert to her ever growing vocabulary.
Sue Walker
20 Sep 2009, 09:55
Gail Peck's "Fountain With Six Children"
How wonderful if this photograph could be posted with your poem -- but I
guess that would bring up legal issues. The poem does make me feel like I
am sitting watching the barefooted girl in the swirling skirt.
Gail, if you look at this, are you the Gail peck who once published in
Negative Capability?
Sue Brannan Walker
18 Sep 2009, 17:13
I love Joan Mazza's poem, "First Hard Freeze." The poem perfectly conjoins
nature and the marriage of fungus and algae -- with the harvest of human
relationships -- and how human nature and Nature need attention and care.
The poem masterfully weaves the history of vegetation, medicine, and food
with the senses, with color, taste, smell, the scent of garlic, sight. I
love the mention of egg salad and broccoli raab.
This poem is a wonderful harvest, wonderful serving of how we are whole.
fanchon Shur
18 Sep 2009, 14:58
greif.........yes to me
i shall try now to write one sentence to bring me back to the rainbow of my
soul.....poetry
Phebe Hanson
17 Sep 2009, 11:13
What a marveous editing job Jill did, although I see how difficult it was!
All the poems were superb and I love your new easy access. I'm a
thoroughly satisfied, happy reader, although I have been resisting the
whole idea of the on-line magazine. Now I can make the type big enough for
even these aging eyes to read!
Mary Stebbins Taitt
16 Sep 2009, 19:11
I need to read them one at a time and savor them. So far, I have read the
first one and loved it.
Sue Walker
16 Sep 2009, 15:35
Ann Fisher-Wirth, you are a neighbor. Our states reside side-by-side.
I love the way your poem takes the reader on a journey as the lines weave
and twine the story of a clime and the witnessed site of execution. You
have marvelously coupled the visual horror with the buying of bread, the
staff of life. The connection between memory and books is integral to our
life as teachers and writers.
Sue Walker
16 Sep 2009, 10:48
Thank you Jill Breckenridge for choosing my poem. It is an honor to be
published in Persimmon Tree. I love your "Civil Blood" (don't know how to
do italics here).
The poems in this featured Southern section are amazing, and I intend to
comment to each author.
Special thanks to Nan Gefen and Persimmon Tree for promoting the poetry of
Southern women.
Rochelle Cashdan
15 Sep 2009, 18:51
Margaret Mullins, I luxuriated in the fusion of language and love in your
poem, "Word Magnet."
Florence Weinberger
15 Sep 2009, 17:46
change of email address
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