Published by Fractal Edge Press
Perfect Bound, 60 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2004
ISBN# 1-933126-05-1
$15.00
About Maureen Tolman Flannery
Maureen Tolman Flannery’s other books include Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, Tunnel Into Morning, Ancestors in the Landscape, Remembered into Life, Secret of the Rising Up, Conversations for the Road, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Snow and Roses.
She grew up in Wyoming in a sheep ranch family near the Big Horn Mountains. Maureen and her actor husband Dan have raised their four children in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in fifty anthologies and two hundred literary reviews, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Xavier Review, Calyx, Pedestal, Atlanta Review, Out of Line, North American Review, Poetry East, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Maureen earned her AB and MA degrees from Creighton University where she met her husband Dan. After living in Mexico, they settled in Evanston, Illinois where they taught English as a Foreign Language for thirty-five years.
Maureen served on the board of the Anam Chara elder-care facility in Boulder and has been a passionate supporter of home-birth, Waldorf education and conscious death. She worked at the Chicago Waldorf School where her four children were educated and her grandson attended.
She edited the anthology Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, (John Gordon Burke Publisher).
Mrs. Flannery is the recipient of an Illinois Art Award and numerous awards including The Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Award, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and many first prizes from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She is a past treasurer of Poets’ Club of Chicago. She currently spends most of her time in Wyoming.
Contents
Pearls
On Edge
Two Step
In the Timber
The Sound of Hollow
Firsts
Lure of the Unconceived
Promise
Well
Midnight Wandering
Joint Garden
Abrasive Love
First Stirrings
On Watching the Unborn Baby Move
Pregnancy – Fifth Month
Eighth Month Big Top
Pyramid
To the Father-To-Be
Involuntary Craftsmanship
Bond
Go Gently
Christening
Kaleidoscope
Guard Duty
Shape-Shifter
Collection
Sleep
Bumps
To a Man of Few Words
Hot Tar
The Wait
Conversation
Initials Carved
Renewal
Back Tickling
Five-Year Old
Kinesiology
In Bad Light
Quickening
Sand Man
In Passing
Vanquishing Newborn
Fruit
Nursing
Craving Peaches
Comfortable Accommodations
Feeding
Canned Peaches
Mothered on Poems
Supply Man
Huevos Revueltos
Workshop
Essence
Summer of the Farm
Farm Nights
First Steps
Disrobing
Dress-Up
Ancestry
Half-Baked
After the Last Page
Sample Poems
Ancestry
They all build in her
like worker bees in a hive,
the pub-mumbling steamfitters
of Hartford, lace-curtain Irish
with dirty closets, lace-limbed ladies
with the dark blue places in their souls,
blarney-filled bakers of potatoes,
readers of tea leaves,
tellers of banshee tales,
beaver-pelted mountain men
who knew that path of bobcats
better than the contours
of their own whiskery faces,
Mormon patriarchs
good at marrying and mentoring
and helping families move,
the hearty, buxom women they married
who bore their longings
like they bore their children,
with a quiet forward thrust
and trust in unknown.
They come together
in my daughter,
all these individuals she has not known,
the blacksmith and the farmer and the fireman,
navigator, artist, sheepman, rancher’s wife.
Unconscious of her content,
she will not tarnish.
Like pure gold hardened to hold jewels,
they meld into her metal
though she knows it not.
Farm Night
Home on the farm,
I take my children
into the friendly night,
the night of a billion
benevolent overhead eyes.
And they feel it too,
amid the cicada percussion,
the silent presence
of great protective forces
brooding above the low-
hanging sparkling darkness.
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