Bøger af Gloria Monaghan

Monaghan's poems are a field guide for seeing our lives with tender clarity. Poems of Hollywood glamour, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, amd surviving romantic deception.

Following in the footprints of Amy Clampitt and Robert Creeley - two of our greatest contemporary naturalist poets - Gloria Monaghan offers this exquisite collection. But, like all other prints left on a nature trail, her footprints are distinctly her own - whether tender, rhapsodic, wistful or sardonic. This trail begins in a cemetery where flowers are left to flourish in the water of tears. It then moves naturally to memories of the poet's father, siblings, a former love, and her children. In all of these poems - and in the others offered here - the words stun in their Dickinsonian simplicity and beauty. "The smell of my daughter's hair breaks my heart."Even when she is describing a grim crime scene ("The police search the reeds and the water ... in the hope of finding a body"), she returns and finds/offers solace in the natural world ("Did your body smell like an ocean?").As befits good poetry, each poem here jars, prods, provokes, disturbs - even in a love poem - often with a sly sense of humor ("Your smell escapes me") or bitter regret ("The daylight / never ceases to astonish / ... as if that's all we need").The richly textured images leave the reader glad to have taken the trek. It is a journey to which the lucky reader will return time and again, each time discovering new growth. - Neil Silberblatt, Founder/Director, Voices of Poetry; Author, Past Imperfect (Nixes Mate Books, 2018), nominated for Mass. Book Award in Poetry