Bøger af Colleen Redman

Poems from the Dark Room is a retrieving of stored memories encoded in the mind and body, a proof of concept retrospective show, held to the light, poem by poem. It's a poetry memoir and a travelogue of aging that zooms in on the big-picture questions where depth psychology and death mythology meet. Personal, generational and universal, the poems are the third collection in a series that was born from the practice of giving the soul the right of way and tending to the grief of life's losses with honesty and honoring in preparation for "The Final Leaving..."when we become the air for others to breathe A memory that floats like a fragrance...

Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife is a collection of 34 poems that probe the questions: 'How much does the essence of one's psyche weigh? Is the soul the one carry-on that we actually take with us? In the end, what do we value and what do we leave behind?' The poems are a distillation that read like a memoir, tracking the journeys of childhood, aging, care giving and life's inevitable losses. Informed by the past and grounded in the present, they're drawn from the inner life, where humor and darkness intersect. Everyday domestic scenes and visitors from the natural world appear as signposts throughout the collection. "At this stage of life, my dreams are more lifelike, and my life is more dreamlike," says the author Colleen Redman, a widely-published poet and writer who covers events for her local newspaper. "Realistic with tinges of the surreal," wrote Felicia Mitchell in a recent review. Mitchell, a poet and creative writing teacher at Virginia's Henry and Emory College, went on to state, "…she has, paradoxically, told the untold, touching on that which resides in both dreams and in life and in the borders between…" Redman, a long-time Floyd, Virginia resident, who is originally from the small coastal town of Hull, Massachusetts, writes about packing a suitcase before returning to her hometown to care for her ailing mother … The last of the packing comes down to one question / should I bring extra shoes or make room for a book / Guide to a Happy Life? / I'm still looking for a good Sinatra record / because he was to your generation / what the Beatles were to mine / and music is a memory that doesn't skip… Another poem takes a metaphysical turn, questioning the reality of time and matter …The days are small / packed tightly together / Not much room / for last minute changes … Poetry is a passport / in the universal mother tongue / It's only 4% visible / and 96% dark riddle … In 2001 Redman wrote The Jim and Dan Stories, a memoir about losing two of her brothers a month apart that was used in a grief and loss class at Radford University before it went out of print. Redman lost her older sister and mother in 2015, a loss she gives voice to in some of the poems.