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1. Julia
Older The Ossabaw Book of HoursISBN 1-882291-65-4 / 36 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"The Ossabaw poems are rich, strange, haunting, with a rare honesty and toughness of fiber, capturing . . . one of the world's special places-fecund, teeming, changeable and changing us. -- J. Pedrick
Julia Older is the winner of a First Hopwood Poetry Award and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Grant for prose. In addition to six poetry collections, her original verse drama Tales of the François Vase has been syndicated nationwide over Public Radio. She is the author of a novel, The Island Queen, based on the life of poet Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) and editor of Celia Thaxter: Selected Writings. Older's poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Nimrod International, and many other journals. Her writing studio is nestled in the treetops of southern New Hampshire.
- Man and woman
First, I would slip my hands
around your waist,
staying awhile close to your body.
You would, perhaps, then put your arms
around me. It is easy that way.
I would do the rest if you did not.
Lie down, friend, your long legs
against my thighs, hand
where few have been.
They tell me he likes young boys.
I look into his eyes
and see a loneliness
that could be a dying planet.
I too like young boys.
Who is that woman,
is she not the old man
whose feet I warmed last winter?
And that girl with sunlit hair,
is she not the boy
I seduced one night on the beach?
The host makes his guest comfortable
then retires. I would do no more.
Come in. But don't be surprised
if I am silent.
I was silent before you arrived- Copyright © 2001 by Julia Older
ISBN 1-882291-64-6 / 40 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"In their taut phrasing and crispness of imagery, Elizabeth Knies's poems display an affinity with classical Chinese poetry. The most incisively delicate of the love lyrics seem like translations from the language of pain." -- Warren Keith Wright
"There's a subtle, understated power in these poems." -- Ellen Wilbur
Elizabeth Knies is the author of four
previous collections of poetry. A native of Pennsylvania, she
won the Sarah Homer Prize for Creative Writing from Allegheny
College, her undergraduate alma mater. After completing a master's
degree in English Language and Linguistics at the University of
New Hampshire, she taught for two and a half years at Shoin Women's
University in Kobe, Japan. Subsequent teaching positions took
her to Missouri and Colorado. Her reviews of film, drama, poetry,
and nonfiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews,
and Portfolio. In 1998 and 1999, as a teaching fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, she earned a master's degree in Creative Writing. She is Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2007–2009.
Last Evening
Last evening, when the light was soft,
I went skinny-dipping in the secret water,
paddling and floating, happy as I'd ever been.
I looked back at the cottage, its high deck plain and steady,
like a good boat waiting at anchor there.
The call of a loon rippled over the hush,
the last note held before it dropped.
Without thinking why,
I let out a passionate, tremulous reply.
For a moment, there was nothing -
just the light chorus of crickets one expects in summer dusk.
Then, from across the lake, he answered back.
Our voices crossed
over the darkening water, mingling and wild.
Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth Knies
3. Jean Pedrick World of Grey &
The Man in the PictureISBN 1-882291-67-0 / 60 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
In
a time of loss, the world greyed out, she sees the beauty of grey
things-fog-a country tarmac road-memory suffusing them with their
occult colors. The Man in the Picture: . . . Ovid, Potemkin .
. . the guy who ran the Ferris wheel at the country fair, a mentor,
her father, and more. An endearing composite . . . even a love
poem. I really like the menfolk, she says.
Jean Pedrick is the author of Wolf Moon, Pride & Splendor, Greenfellow, and several chapbooks. Her new book Catgut is forthcoming from Salmon Publishing in Ireland. She lives from May to November at Skimmilk Farm in Brentwood, New Hampshire, where she holds a peer workshop, ongoing since 1975. She winters in Boston.
THE WORLD OF GREY
Mourning doves, early sweatshirts, tarmac,
the textured world of grey.
That linen dress I had, old
salt-glazed jugs, some cats. The fog.
White is where all color lives. Black
is where all color goes. But grey
pretends no color was, nor ever
will be. The color of murmur.
The color of the musical rest.Copyright © 2001 by Jean Pedrrick
ISBN 1-882291-68-9/ 36 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
"We travel in the poet's good company . . . marveling over the world . . . Sappho, Galatea and a woman who could turn herself into a hare join aunties and friends, in shedding light." -- J. Pedrick
Katherine Solomon lives in Sutton, New
Hampshire, and is an Adjunct Professor of English at the New Hampshire
Technical College in Claremont. Her poems have appeared in Green
Mountains Review, Baybury Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Worcester
Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals, as
well as in several anthologies, including Orpheus & Company:
Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology, and Under the Legislature
of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets. She is a member of the Artists
& Poets Collaborative at White Pines College, and the recipient
of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the NH State Council on
the Arts for the year 2000.
WOOD'S EDGE: WINTER
One fat partridge
requiem-walks downslope
from the apple tree
across the crisp top
of three feet of snow.
Her deliberate way
dissects the gabble-scrabble
mess made yesterday
when wild turkeys scratched
under bare poles
of deer-muzzle soft
sumac sticking up in clumps
like beach-grass
through sand. The wild red
canes of raspberry curve
through frigid air, an arch
description of better days.
When the bird stands still
she could pass for a stump,
her head the splintered last
of a tall tree's reach.
Copyright © 2001 by Katherine Solomon
5. J. Kates MappemondeISBN 1-882291-63-8 / 36 pp. Paper / Price: $8.00
Moments in time: boys playing their baseball heroes; conversations of a Vietnamese veteran and what he does not say, or of Monet in his old age; one poem translates Pushkin's view of the Crucifixion--all with the resonance of true poetry.
J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire.
MAPPEMONDE
Sometimes dragons move across the maps
opened in books or Second Avenue grime
and throttle windy cherubs blowing Taps
or with their scaly tails slap and beslime
the wrinkled mainland where a brown cape droops.
These are the magic maps that draw you in,
written in Latin and French and curlicues.
They swarm with untold legends, opaline
visions gathered on a fearful cruise,
showing off wonders never to be seen.
And so the dragons move, the cherubs choke,
islands rise and sink under the tide.
Out of a careless nostril sometimes smoke
parodies lettering it floats beside
and vanishes in a wisp before you look.
Strange necromancy in a yellow chart
old enough to bear the unicorn,
chronicling matters that are worlds apart.
It might be faded, torn, or water-worn,
yet bold enough to give us all a start.
Copyright © 2001 by J. Kates
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