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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. In addition to eleven poetry collections, her original verse drama Tales of the François Vase has been performed over Public Radio. She authored 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. After the Patriot Act of 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq she dedicated Tahirih Unveiled to the Iraqui diplomat Akla al Hashim (killed in 2005) and Director Safia Ama Jan, Ministry of Women's Affairs (killed in 2006) and the struggle of all women who are "silent" and "invisible".
- 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
Portsmuth NH Poet Laureate 2007-2009.
"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 collections of poetry. She
won the Sarah Homer Prize for Creative Writing from Allegheny
College, completed a master's
degree in English Language and Linguistics at the UNH, she taught Shoin Women's
University in Kobe, Japan. Her reviews of film, drama, poetry,
and nonfiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews,
and Portfolio. In 1999 at Creative Writing Program in Boston University, she earned a master's degree in Creative Writing.
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 (1922-2006) who lived in Boston is the author of Wolf Moon,
Pride & Splendor, Greenfellow, several chapbooks and Catgut
from Salmon Publishing in Ireland. From May to November at Skimmilk
Farm in Brentwood, New Hampshire, where she held a peer workshop, since
1975. She co-founded the Alice James Cooperative, as well as the
Rowamtree Press She taught at Northeastern University and at Boston
Center for Adult education.
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, living in Sutton, New
Hampshire, is 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 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 received an 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. Among his awards are the
National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in
Poetry,with a dozen books of transations. He is author of The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and The Old Testament.
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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