Bøger af Irene Willis

In this first collection of her poems, Irene Willis takes the ordinary stuff of life--a childhood in New York, an adored father who drank too much, a mother's slow decline and death, a second love and marriage--and transforms it into unforgettable poetry. She was born a poet, one of those children who hang around adults avidly waiting for stories. In the poem "Fat Arms," Go out and play, my mother would say. But I wanted to listen for what my friends and I would do later down in the street when we had on our mothers' old dresses and high heels, a circle of rouge on each cheek, giant pocketbooks under our arms. In that image from the child's point of view--"giant pocketbooks"--Willis opens our own memories of that sweet, uneasy time. She, too, hated the barber, worshipped her grade-school teachers, and was tender to ladybugs; these emotions are evoked with childhood's intensity and presented in rich detail and with a sense of humor rare in modern poetry: "Grandma wanted to / shake Florence until / the raisins rattled / in her rice-pudding / brain" (from "Aunt Florence Always Wore Pastels"). The third section, poems about her mother's decline and death, is a tour de force. These poems should be gloomy, but they are not. Because there is so much love between mother and daughter and so much love of life in both of them, the poems, like the people, refuse to sit down and cry. Here is an excerpt from "Dancing Feet": I want my dancing feet, my mother said . . . This was the lady who used to do the shimmy and the Charleston, who fox-trotted her way into one marriage and out, then met another husband at a dance and took the measure of him by his two-step. I stood up, moved to music for her, swinging into an elegant solo dip worthy of chiffon, rhinestones, marcel wave. She bobbed and clapped. From the last section, a tribute to love come upon in middle age, this poem, quoted in full, gives some idea of the power of the poet's imagination and the grace of her diction: On Dingle Walking away from the burden of who I am down a dirt road on Dingle, I see myself. I see us, you and me, from the back. I see our packs, bulging with the oddments of our profession of being who we are the ones who carry ourselves wherever we go. Wild thyme scents the air; small black flies circle our heads; the dirt underfoot is quiet. Stealthily, we walk past a farmhouse, a fence. A dog comes out, barking in Mother Goose. The road is a lane, the gate a stile and you, whose head is a foot above mine in your separate packet of purple-scented air, are my fancy. I am your locket, your love your tuffet, your curds, your whey. The Ireland of our fathers, yours and mine, waits like a pocket, open to catch us, plucked from the lane like two pennies.

Irene Willis has written a book of poems that are so disarming, as if each poem was born out of an artlessness as elemental as spontaneous speech itself. But this is, of course, aesthetic artifice at its most refined, the art of getting out of one''s own way as one writes, so that the dye on the dyer''s hand is never noticed--Eugene Mahon. MD

In her poignant new collection, Rehearsal, poet Irene Willis gifts us with a remarkable discovery-that to embrace the truths of dying is to celebrate life. In clear precise language, Willis enables us to share the couple's deep love shining through details of their days, to know that no matter one's age, the moment of death surprises. The book's second section deals with the after time, as in the remarkable poem titled "Hers" when "she started to own her own life"-that the loneliness of widowhood brings with it the strengths of independence. Blended in are poems of vivid childhood experience, her mother's aging time, exchanges with other poets. To read these poems by Irene Willis is to have one's own life enriched by her clarity of vision, her voice of wisdom and courage. -Charlotte Mandel, author of To Be The Daylight Each passing year of life, each new wrinkle of the skin, each hesitation of limbs and, above all, each loss of a loved one, is a preparation for what awaits us at the end of our lives' journeys. Nonetheless, the sojourn brings us glimpse of great joy, pride, musing, thrill, the pleasure of efficacy, lust, and yes, also sadness, defeat, shame, regret and remorse. Irene Willis offers us lexical snapshots taken along this bittersweet highway and does so with great eloquence and dignity.Salman Akhtar Author of Freshness of the Child (2018)