Poetry

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey

April 24, 2015 by Darlene

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey is a collection of poems that are quite powerful. While my initial attraction to the collection was the title and beautiful book cover, it soon became apparent that these poems run so much deeper than that. The collection reflects on the author’s own childhood growing up near the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee where nuclear experiments were conducted and the effects that this had on her growing up and years later on her health as an adult.

The poems are so full of imagery and I thought sadness. Sadness in growing up as a kid and not knowing that doing something as simple as chewing on a blade of grass or tasting snow could be so bad for you. As you read her words you can almost feel the radiation and sickness closing in on you; the unfairness of it all. Yet there is hope in the the water lilies that bloom and the sunflowers that are planted and in just being a kid. It was interesting to see both sides of the coin – the goodness and beauty in the world around you and yet the devastation in how easily it can all crumble.

As always I am no expert when it comes to poetry but I enjoyed this collection and hope to read more from this author. The poems reflect real life mixed with science fiction mixed with the devastating effects of the nuclear world. These poems continue to haunt me and I don’t think I’ll soon forget them. I’ll leave you with a piece I found particularly powerful… not to mention the author’s poetry shows her amazing talent much better than I could ever put into words.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter (recumbent)

She lies back on a floor of pine needles looking up at a sky
obscured by crooked branches. But she can’t be back-
this must be a memory, tricking her, her hands on the damp
violets and moss, the sharp shells of acorns a mirage.
If she could, she would once again be part of this wood,
her own cells the building blocks of the next flower,
the next kit fox. Trace elements still exist inside her
that call her to this place, the skeleton of decayed leaves
a reminder that her own skeleton, marrow emptied out,
might emit the same markers, might show
the exact same chemical makeup. When she was young
there were so many daffodils, she could not pick them all-
she ran her hands along their frilled faces, she placed
her face in their clusters and smiled, covered in yellow
pollen. Even the glue of their stems on her hands smelled
like sunshine. One more trick. She lies back,
and remembers perennials that no longer exist.
She will not die here in concrete. Her body belongs there,
in a flower-field tilled under, waiting, vast and empty,
for her to return.

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Source: Review copy provided by the publisher for an honest review. Poem taken from The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey, Page 68, eBook copy. No compensation was received.

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Doll God by Luanne Castle

February 20, 2015 by Darlene

Doll God by Luanne Castle is a collection of poetry that is haunting and sometimes dark and yet hopeful speaking to your heart and soul. I’m no expert on poetry as most who read my blog know but I’m opening my heart to it and learning to experience it if that makes sense and hopefully others like me will do the same. I’m thoroughly enjoying delving more and more into the beautiful world of poetry.

This collection takes us on a journey through many emotions and stages like loss, sickness, marriage, divorce, and motherhood. The poems are very vivid and bring to life an image very clearly in your mind. Most of the poems deal with dolls whether they be beautiful or in decay and take us through some point in time bringing forth in us emotions that reflect our innermost thoughts that are never spoken aloud.

Like the author I love dolls. I used to collect porcelain ones and I had my walking doll that I idolized when I was younger. As I read through these poems I kept reflecting and imagining the lives of my old dolls and I think that’s what I liked so much about this collection. As a child your dolls always have these lives – sometimes better than yours, sometimes worse – but through our imagination we could go anywhere with them.

The poetry of Doll God speaks to the heart whether it be through dolls or the human condition. It makes you feel emotion whether good or bad and I think that’s what poetry is about. I think it’s important as well that a poem speaks to everyone differently. While I may not always get the meaning the author was trying to convey I do feel the emotions that are portrayed that lead me to either like a piece or not like it. For me, Luanne Castle’s collection spoke to me emotionally and that’s what this newbie looks for when reading poetry!

To end I’d like to share a favorite poem with all of you…

Calculating Loss

Birds have the number sense
to know when an egg in a nest
of five goes missing.
If you have four chairs in the kitchen you don’t have to count
to know
one has been taken away,
to realize one car
cools in the double garage.

Every day the world subtracts from itself and nothing is immune.
Not these pebbles from our walks along the lakeshore: pebbles you collected

in this jar which
remains half full,
though for some reason I think of it as overflowing.

(from Doll God by Luanne Castle)

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Source: Digital review copy received from the author for an honest review. No compensation was received.

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Guest Post with Luanne Castle, author of Doll God

February 19, 2015 by Darlene

Please join me in welcoming Luanne Castle, author of Doll God to the blog today. Luanne is touring with Serena’s new venture Poetic Book Tours from February 8-March 7/15. I’ll be posting a review of Luanne’s poetry collection tomorrow so I don’t want to give too much away other than to say I really enjoyed it. I can see now from reading her guest post where the beauty and sadness in her poetry comes from so thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us Luanne. So please enjoy Luanne’s post on what inspires her to write poetry…

Thank you so much, Darlene, for inviting me to write about my poetry muse. Asking what inspires me to write a poem forces me to look at the subject head on, so it’s a learning experience for me.

The other day I sat at the bank, waiting for the banker to notarize a document for me. I was bored and it was my fourth errand, so I hadn’t checked my emails in hours. Glancing at my iPhone, I saw a recent email from a friend. I dipped into it and found a link to an article about the death of a young actor. Within a manner of seconds, my mind zipped from thinking of the ways a young person might suddenly die to my actor daughter and her actor friends to the genre” of online obituaries. Each thought was accompanied with a sputtering steam of emotions. I realized that the juxtaposition of my relaxed and professional demeanor at the bank with the lid-rocking cauldron of emotions I felt inside meant that a poem was in the making.

Maybe a lot of poems come into being from bouncing against a boundary or the comparison/contrast of disparate images or thoughts.

Following Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant,” sometimes I set up the juxtaposition on purpose as a way to look at something common in a new light. I wrote a series of poems a few years ago that purposefully took a scientific image or theory and paired it with a folk or fairy tale just to see what would happen.

The old tales are also inspirational for me. I am struck by certain stories from my childhood. Their resonance seems to have permanent residence in my thought patterns and in my life. They grow and change with my world. In my new book Doll God the Snow White story and a Japanese tale called “The Stonecutter” inspired several poems.

Water–lake, ocean, river–is one of my inspirations. That might be because I grew up in Michigan, which is bounded by four of the five great lakes and contains 11,000 lakes within those shores. We lived on the lake in the summer. Sometimes I can still feel the seaweed under my feet on lake bottom.

For many of the poems in Doll God, dolls have been inspirational. As a child, I loved dolls and used to transform our living room and hallway into an imaginary town for my dolls. My grandmother, who was the Head Fitter at the 28 Shop at Marshall Fields in Chicago, designed and sewed beautiful outfits for my imitation Barbie and for my walking doll. Because I grew up with the imaginary world of dolls, I can’t see a doll that doesn’t inspire me for a poem. Often my imagination will transform the doll into a magical portal through which to see more of the human heart.

About Doll God

Luanne Castle’s debut poetry collection, Doll God, studies traces of the spirit world in human-made and natural objects–a Japanese doll, a Palo Verde tree, a hummingbird. Her exploration leads the reader between the twin poles of nature and creations of the imagination in dolls, myth, and art.

From the first poem, which reveals the child’s wish to be godlike, to the final poem, an elegy for female childhood, this collection echoes with the voices of the many in the one: a walking doll, a murderer, Snow White. Marriage, divorce, motherhood, and family losses set many of the poems in motion. The reader is transported from the lakes of Michigan to the Pacific Ocean to the Sonoran Desert.

These gripping poems take the reader on a journey through what is found, lost, or destroyed. The speaker in one poem insists, “I am still looking for angels.” She has failed to find them yet keeps searching on. She knows that what is lost can be found.

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About the Author

Luanne Castle has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside; Western Michigan University; and Stanford University. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Barnstorm Journal, Grist, The Antigonish Review, Ducts, TAB, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, Wisconsin Review, The MacGuffin, and other journals. She contributed to Twice-Told Children’s Tales: The Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults, edited by Betty Greenway. Luanne divides her time between California and Arizona, where she shares land with a herd of javelina.

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Source: Post information received from the author and the tour company. No compensation was received.

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Guest Post with Laura Foley, author of Joy Street & Giveaway (US/Canada)

January 15, 2015 by Darlene

Please join me in welcoming Laura Foley to Peeking Between the Pages today with a guest post and giveaway. Yesterday I reviewed her book of poetry entitled Joy Street and I really enjoyed it (my review). Today she joins us with a guest post about where her passion for poetry came from…

My passion for poetry started in Fifth or Sixth grade when my English teacher played a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his poem, Fern Hill. His scratchy Welsh-accented male voice filled the classroom and thrilled me. I loved the mystery of the words that evoked a fairy-tale-like childhood (“When I was young and easy, under the apple boughs…”) and then moved at the end to frightening sad images of struggle and death (“…though I sang in my chains like the sea”). Later I studied English Lit. in college and received a Masters and a MPhil (everything but dissertation in American Poetry) BUT I did not write my own poem, not one, until I was forty-five years old. I didn’t think I could do it. I was content being a scholar, leaving the creative world to others. I was also busy raising three children, travelling the world with my professor-husband. At forty-five, my husband (much older than I) died, and I turned with all my passion, sorrow and energy to the creative life, and now, twelve years later, have completed six books of poetry (two are presently in manuscript, seeking publishers), won awards, published widely. I love writing poetry, little glimpses of life, and I also conduct writing workshops for those dealing with grief, loss, illness. It’s rewarding and inspiring work.

About the Book

Each poem in this radiantly plainspoken collection offers subtle and penetrating observations that swell to a rich tapestry of ordinary life, beheld from a stance of grace and buoyancy. Starting with intimations of desire in childhood, these poems travel through ordinary domestic scenes to the blessing of a maturity in which the narrator, still embracing desire and wild promise, thrives in the midst of life’s darker gifts. This collection is truly a joy to read. It puts to shame those of us who walk through our days with “the din of loneliness,” ignoring life’s many invitations for bliss.

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About the Author

Laura Foley is the author of four poetry collections. The Glass Tree won the Foreword Book of the Year Award, Silver, and was a Finalist for the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, and in the anthology, In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief. She won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Award and the Grand Prize for theAtlanta Review’s International Poetry Contest. She lives on a woody hill in South Pomfret, Vermont with her partner Clara Gimenez and their three dogs. Please visit her website for book information or more poems: laurafoley.net.

GIVEAWAY – OPEN TO US & CANADIAN RESIDENTS

1 copy up for giveaway!

*CLICK HERE* and fill out the form to enter

Draw Date January 31/15

Source: All information and giveaway provided by the tour company. No compensation was received.

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Joy Street by Laura Foley

January 14, 2015 by Darlene

Joy Street is a short and beautiful little book of poetry that portrays in a very honest way the later years in Laura Foley’s life. Having lived her earlier years in a traditional marriage she has chosen to live the later part of her life with her partner Clare who had also once been part of a traditional marriage. I love that the two have found such joy in each other despite dealing with Clare’s illness. The poems cover a wide range of things in the author’s life from her father’s wartime years, children, relationships, pets, to the sorrow of dealing with a loved one’s illness.

I liked that the poems are short and to the point. The beauty and sensuousness of the poetry shines through in the sparseness of the words used and many times that is so much more powerful than using more words. They portray the emotions, the awkwardness, the love and the pain that all of us feel at some point in our lives. Joy Street is about finding what joy you can in this world wherever you can and that truly touched my heart.

I had quite a few favorite pieces but I’ll share just one…

No GPS Necessary

I love you, I say, as we leave the hotel room,

as we take the elevator down,

and stroll city blocks

to the hospital,

as we walk the antiseptic corridors,

and she’s wheeled away,

as I return to Joy Street,

where yesterday

she said those words to me.

I love how this piece of poetry reflects both the pain and ultimate joy in the love that the author shares with her partner. I’m looking forward to reading more of the author’s work after experiencing the moving beauty of Joy Street.

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Source: Digital review copy provided by the publisher for an honest review. No compensation was received.

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