Subtitle: Reflections on Motherhood
By Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Photography by May Lattanzio
Number one in the Celebration Series of chapbooks
Author's Web site: www.howtodoitfrugally.com/poetry_books.htm
Amazon Link: www.budurl.com/motherchapbook
ISBN: 978-1438263793
Also available for Kindle
Reviewed originally for Amazon by Zoe Potok, Czech Republic
REVIEW
She Wore Emerald Then
I read this collection of thirty poems
slowly, allowing myself only a few at a time usually before I went to bed. The
poems deserve such an approach, they need to settle in the mind and soul, to be
savoured like a good wine.
The description (on the Amazon.com site
only) says "Moods of Motherhood" but it is more than that. At its
heart it is about a grown-up child reflecting on the elderly and dying mother
and on earlier days when the mother was the strong adult and other. Maybe it is
because I am at that stage of life (with a grown-up son and a frail mother)
that the poems meant so much to me. The description also suggests that it would
make the ideal Mother's Day gift, I'm not so sure about that, I certainly
wouldn't give it to my mother, too close to home.
The two poets come at the subject from
different points: Magdalena Ball talks about the cosmos before focusing in on
the personal with her late poems, Carolyn Howard-Johnson starts with and
continues with the personal. And it is the personal that catches the reader in
the throat:
We all forget names, I say as numb
moves from hand to heart
because it is my name she has forgotten.
~More on the reviewer: Zoe Brooks (Potok) is a poet and writer. She is the author of Fool’s Paradise a long poem for voices http://www.amazon.com/Fools-Paradise-ebook/dp/B0087EB5KA/
She blogs at http://zoebrooks.blogspot.com/-----
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