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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Willow Tree by Harriet Ribot
ADVANCE ORDER: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/willow-tree-by-harriet-ribot/
With humor and pathos, Harriet Ribot incorporates a thinly veiled odyssey of life around her. She became a Registered Nurse at twenty, married at twenty-two, raised four successful sons through the seventies and eighties, and collated the works and biography of friend, classical guitarist and composer Frantz Casseus into a book of sheet music for Solo Guitar: “The Complete Works of Frantz Casseus” (Tuscany Publications, 2003). She then earned her long-desired BA with a concentration in Journalism at Rutgers-Newark. She credits her successes to her very supportive family and a book she often read to her children The Little Train that Could (Platt and Monk, 1930).
PRAISE FOR Willow Tree by Harriet Ribot
The willow tree that forms the heart of Ribot’s collection is constantly evolving, “roughed up by high winds,” putting forth “a profusion of tightly knit buds” and then new leaves “like pigtails sporting a tie.” The poet renders what she sees faithfully, precisely, in musical lines that capture both the willow’s beauty and its vulnerability as it holds light and shadow, the present and the past, blue jays and cardinals. Poem by poem, the willow becomes an apt figure for the natural world as well as for our own passing lives.
–Jennifer Barber
Harriet Ribot paints with words, creating a portrait of a willow with March boughs “clean and spare/as a whippet/straining/at the starting gate.” With sparse lines she creates mystery, elegy, and focused attention. Step in among the leaves and imagine what tales she has braided into a crown, with grace.
–Tina Kelley, author of Rise Wildly and Abloom & Awry.
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We believe nothing
is more valuable
than disaster.
We have learned
good news
is not news.
This shrinks
my own sweet
aperture.
Will I see
what does not
flame out?
Will I love
what isn't
first-ever?
from “‘Expose for the Flame’” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 23
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...every inch we grow
is a step closer to a new splendor.
We will hear her songs unmuffled.
Life after birth will engulf, delight.
And after that, a third dimension
for the color wheel. Foreign music.
Do not rest in peace, beloved. Soar,
gambol, joke, be busy, string jewel
words, exalt, exult. Who is sure death
isn't a brighter world to emerge into?
from “I Talk to My Twin, 38 Weeks Gestation” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 71-72
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...I like woods in the winter, but he thinks
everything looks dead. I won't agree, won't find the world
ugly four months of the year...
from “Someone Scratched Hope on the Trail” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 51
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....We scrubbed
each scruff, painted every ding, wished we'd done it years ago. But we miss
messiness--to splay, mark turf, jump to the next project before cleaning up.
from “Bob and Sally Laminate Are Moving Out” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 30
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...I'd write even if each page's
only destination were the stove, for winter heat. Again and again.
from “Yawp” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. xix
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How do flags ever fly full-staff?
Each year we use enough coffin steel
to build a Golden Gate bridge.
from “For the Life of Me” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 68
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“That First Week after the Last Day of School” by Tina Kelley
The day has the pace of the tangle pulled out of a brush,
wafting to the grass. The backyard’s the everything room,
the always room. We mix clover and privet to make June.
Cardinal’s a hole in the blue-green world, a hole red tears through.
They ask, “What if the moon turned inside out?”
Thanks for the reminder to think this way.
I am transcribing the wind chime music with them, one color per note.
Cloud shadows piebald the hill. The cardinal sounds like a tambourine.
We discuss the geometric patterns on our eyelids as we sunbathe.
Down with Caesar! she writes in her play. Things that end are mean.
We’ll drink from the sprinkler, we decide.
It’s too hot out now, too far to go inside.
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We'll have to pardon the future now. It will challenge us.
But we have survived the first yawn during a kiss....
So we grow, roots and canopy,
higher, deeper, aiming for always,
a wave tossing foam in the sun.
from “Still Life with Ice Sculpture and Candles” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 36
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...I let your devoted pets live as long as you do.
I give clear guidelines about religion: one,
voluntary, aiming for love and the full growth
of each follower. And of each who chooses
not to follow. I leave out committees, tumors,
corporations, lobbyists, mosquitoes, pro football.
I put a bell tower in every town, plus professional
harmonica players, photographers, masseuses,
reporters, and comedians. Many academics,
no academia--no committees, remember?
The rivers around Manhattan run roaring, not flat,
to match the city. Each moth has its own song.
Just before you die I get to tell you, OK, this
is what you were supposed to be, a composer
with five foster kids, and you should have married
that guy in St. Paul, and let your folks move in.
Every kitchen implement works as completely
and elegantly as my thick, solid spatula.
Strawberries and dried peaches smell better.
I'd invent more verbs for the sun than shine,
stream, rise, set, hide, blaze, and glow.
I call musical chairs illegal, to save five-year-olds
that cruel moment of losing face on center stage.
Japanese maples, smoked almonds, and waltzes prevail,
and I sit back and watch, flipping channels,
country to country, drama to musical comedy.
How long can you let this universe last?
from “The Next Creation of the Universe” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 12-13
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...I praise
ways to create, painting with menstrual blood
on cave walls, Zen sand art by kitty in litter,
painted toddler feet tromping on the ceiling.
I worship every reason I cried this year,
slow songs, missing Dad, children refusing
to come downstairs for their special pancakes...
from “Abloom & Awry” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 11
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God lurks in the story of stethoscope,
kaleidoscope, microscope, but also in the punched
ache of falling apart: accidents, insanities, plot twists
surpassing human imagination. God's the sparrow
in the convention center, the skateboard akimbo
on the freeway shoulder...
from ”Abloom & Awry” in Abloom & Awry: Poems by Tina Kelley, p. 10
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Happy National Poetry Month!!! Please consider supporting FLP by purchasing a book. FLP can only survive if we get purchases or donations. Thank you for your support.
FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY (One Last Word Program):
Another Troy Poems by Joan Wehlen Morrison – Edited by Susan Signe Morrison
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/another-troy-by-joan-wehlen-morrison-edited-by-susan-signe-morrison/
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Joan Wehlen Morrison taught at the New School and wrote two oral histories. Her wartime poetry was found posthumously along with her diaries, recently published as Home Front Girl, edited by her daughter, Susan Signe Morrison. Living in Austin, Texas, Susan has written books on the Middle Ages and the novel Grendel’s Mother.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Another Troy by Joan Wehlen Morrison –
Edited by Susan Signe Morrison
With growing solicitude at the coming of the Second World War, teenager Joan Wehlen Morrison struggled in her poems to understand the enormous realities of her time while also learning about love and romance, the passage of time, maturity – topics common to most of us at such an age, but topics troubled profoundly by the hatred and loss and violence of the 1930s and 40s. Reading these poems is remembering with nostalgia what it means to be young and setting out. Sadly, they also echo the deeper question that all of us – young and old alike – are today once again forced to ponder: what is to come of us in a world gone mad? In Another Troy, Morrison aches for answers, for truth, in the way only a teenager can. –Steve Wilson, author of The Reaches.
Did you ever own a notebook, and did you open it, perhaps at night, to write about the daily happenings of a world whose pace, magnitude, beauty, and violence staggered your imagination? If so, these poems are for you. Joan Wehlen Morrison‘s Another Troy captures what it feels like to be an emerging political, intellectual, and romantic young woman in wartime—when, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/ of what is found there.” The poems in Another Troy see beauty and brokenness and honor both. “The moon is a bent feather in the sky” in one poem; “there is an empty orchard in Flanders/Rotting in the rain” in another. Tender and aware, these poems cannot help but imagine foreshortened futures, so that when Morrison writes that the “wind was like a boy’s breath,” we wonder if the boy is at war, and if he will live to see adulthood. In other poems, the poet scrutinizes her own life, imagining “this girl in the blue dress and Juliet cap — / I will be utterly disappeared.” Luckily for us, Morrison’s poems have not disappeared, and when she writes, “I am a moving window[,]” I feel lucky to have been able to glimpse the world through it.
–Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights and Field Folly Snow
Prepare to be charmed and enthralled by these beautiful, sincere poems full of artistry and verve. Joan Morrison, born in 1922, confronts the realities of war and love in witty and learned verse. “But darling, platonic as I know we are,/I fear, against all reason, I still want to be/Immensely Epicurean with you,” she writes. Her work transcends the passing seasons of a nation and a life.
–Tina Kelley, author most recently of Rise Wildly and Abloom & Awry (CavanKerry Press.)
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