I’ve been reading minds – great minds – and their lush words lately. Part of taking the chapbook class I’m taking with Connie Green is that I’m supposed to read three poems each day. I have failed at this goal miserably for weeks. Up until the past week three-four weeks (we started the class in mid-November). But eventually, something clicked in my brain after my surgery last month and I started craving words. I wasn’t able yet to sit up at my desk for more than five-ten minutes at a time, so I wasn’t doing much creating of my own words. And I couldn’t focus long on reading material because my body still suffered from anesthesia brain fog for weeks after the surgery. Poetry seemed a great answer to start out on. Most poetry is short, a partial page, up to two pages. And it’s rich in imagery, symbolism, and things you often want/need to read more than once, anyway. So I started out with The Nature of Kin, by Julie Pratt.
Julie is one of the members of my 7:00 a.m. Online Writing Group and is such a great poet. She loves nature and nature absolutely comes to life in her poetry, even for someone like me, who knows almost nothing about the true essence of nature. (I often say of myself, “Yes, I’m a nature freak: put me out in nature and watch me freak!”) Julie’s chapbook of poetry is divided into two sections – Roots and Resilience. Roots deals with family, even the relationships that are not so easy; Resiliency opens up to include experiences “that have influenced and shaped her” in some way, but all in beautifully lyrical natural voice, seasonal tones, environmental incantations, all through majestic undertakings. Perhaps my favorite line in the first section comes from the poem, “The First Time.” “She lifted her child like an armful/ of daisies, laying her in my lap,/ my tears dissolving into devotion,” describing the first time she held her niece. I’ve never held my own niece, but I have held my cousin’s children, and I know that feeling, that tenderness, that moment when something inside me promises to protect them at any cost. An armful of daisies, indeed! In Resiliency, I found myself emotionally motivated by “And Still We Come,” determined to see changes; dedicated to better living by “Ode to Life,” where “the wholeness of/ everything breaks open my heart;” and promising to let go of what doesn’t matter, as the various images in “Legacy” surrender, release, bow, and set free “clouds of silk-winged seeds/ a prayer to the wind.” You can order “The Nature of Kin” by contacting Julie at jprattwv@gmail.com or find her at www.facebook.com/julie.pratt.505
The next poetry book I read was PostScripts, by Renee K. Nicholson, another West Virginia writer, who I met at the West Virginia Writers Conference when I was part of a panel presentation there in June. Renee and I sat down and got to know each other after the session I co-presented and have become fast friends. It is available through Wild Ink Publishing and is dedicated to her brother Nate, who died of cancer, in his early 40s. PostScripts is a collection of literary postcards to Nate and others, as well, about people and places Renee has known in her storied lifetime. She’s a dancer and loves to travel. She is innocently elegant, not someone who shoves her class down your throat. Each poem seems to take us on a journey, sometimes to someplace exotic – Barcelona, the Amazon Basin, Edge of the Amazon, The Met, The Old World, Amsterdam, etc. – other times to West Virginia, [Her] Brother’s House, Bluegrass Kitchen, Vacationland, a cancer clinic, etc. Collections of people and places, all real on some great plane, all met in some way connecting her to them then, or maybe later in her mind, as she creates these postcards from her life to serve as time marks to share with her brother, to share her brother with a world she doesn’t want to ever forget him once he is gone. There are so many powerful passages, I dare not start listing them – I will be here all night. What I will do instead is list some of my favorite poems from the collection of poems: “Curtain Call;” “Dreamland;” “Bury the Lead,” which touches on the drug problem in Appalachia through a car crash into a ballet studio where the driver was shooting up while driving; “Sex Lives of Preppy Girls;” “Postcard from the Edge of the Amazon;” “Vacationland,” yet another instance of people from the outside coming in to take away from Appalachians’ what is ours and we watch them do it until we finally say enough is enough, but it’s probably too late; and “Because Rest Was Once a Creative Act.” Nicholson deals largely with grief – of her brother, her heritage, our humanity – throughout the collection, but still finds room to leave us with hope. Because the world is bigger than the bad things; beauty and grace will keep us when we think there’s no other way out. Definitely a challenging collection, especially if you, too, have a grieving heart, but ultimately, hopeful because we all get through this thing called life together.
Danita Dodson is a friend whose work also appeared in 24 Tales, and we met at a vendors’ event in the fall. She hails from Sneedville, Tennessee. Her poetry book, Between Gone & Everlasting, is through Resource Publications in Eugene, Oregon. Danita’s book also deals largely with grief, grief of losing her father, someone who loomed as large as life got in her world, and the book examines how she learned to deal with his absence through using the power of words to connect to nature and to preserve her memories of him. Her poems have an acute Appalachian flavor, lush language, and connections to nature throughout the collection. They are divided into four sections – Whippoorwill’s Call, Photomosaic, Map of Home, and Light in the Mourning. My favorite poem comes early on in the collection, “Dragonfly’s Vigil,” where a dragonfly visits her for an extended period of time – overnight – landing near her, and she asks if it is her father come to visit, “And when it heard me whisper Daddy,/ the wings opened like outstretched arms,/ reaching out with stirring solace to say,/ Love outlies the edges of life and death.” Other poems that spoke to my heart include “My First Memory of Death,” which harkens back to the days of catching lightning bugs and putting them in jars; “Threads,” which compares death to fabric and the many processes it endures; “Revisiting Roads,” about places her father lived and grew up; “Song Leader,” an ode to one of her father’s roles in the community/church; “Invincible,” with the great imagery, “wrinkles are the roads I’m walking,/ each gray hair the song of an enduring man/ who will never be altered by time./ For I am not gone. I am everlasting;” “Memory Keepers,” which is about those of us whose role is to carry on tradition, to bring forth the memories of our people from generation to generation; and another favorite, “Heaven As Highway 33,” a poem proposing that heaven isn’t paved with streets of gold, perhaps, but rather, with the sights and scenes of a familiar ribbon of highway from our lifetime, bygone days, and memories as precious as any treasure we’ve been promised. There’s a heaviness, a tightness, because that is what grief is, but in the end, there is love – there is freedom in remembering, and relief and gratitude of a life lived well, even though it means a daughter has to move on when her father leaves this life – because, in the end, he remains, in everything she sees and does, Between Gone & Everlasting.
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