Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 96
- Language: English
- Date Published: Sept. 2024
- ISBN 978-1-962847-13-1
Praise
Irene Mitchell, in the first poem of this evocative collection, invites us to join her in the making of her music as it diverges to a many-melodied composition. She trusts us from the start, asking for our interpretations and suggestions. Mitchell is the conductor. She plans to, and does, deliver a score that is “cosmic and natural.” We follow Mitchell’s inventive navigation through the bounties and throes of life. True to that end, the last poem converts the poet to a pilot who “keeps a steady eye on the view.” This stunning collection is divided into five easy pieces, each one a realm of diverting meditations which, in turn, are “forwarded to something else, something unforgettable.” Mitchell describes that something as “messages and marvels of the mind” which are “sacred to the process.” She asks us (because we are her interpreters) to “taste and see” because these meditations, like vapors tossed are “not so deep so as not to deceive.” Indeed, the poems in this collection do not deceive for they are all of equal value. There is richness in every poem. That is to say, the treasury is brimming. —Carolyn Rhodes, author of Library Girls of New York
This exquisitely-drawn poetry collection is a meditation within itself, investigating the balances sought among the natural world, creativity, philosophy, intellect and societal demands. Meditations, Mitchell suggests, “are vapors tossed /and upon their return /come messages /and provocations /sacred to the process.” Within these pages are vapors ripe with wisdom and whimsy, ponderings and astute observations, and the ever-present grappling of how to achieve finite understanding in a world busy with intellectual interruptions and artificial, external expectations. Our worries create a “stiffness /where the cranium meets the neck.” Balance is celebrated in these deftly-chosen words and images; a yearning to capture and unravel age-old mysteries focused on the meaning of being human ; the ever-present realization that one must live and thrive “ employing all the threads/ that seem appropriate to the occasion.” The result is a superb poetic exploration, one in which we are encouraged to “Concentrate on the song /of the waterfall/ while keeping a curious eye on the open space.” —Carolyn Breckinridge, author of Tuscaloosa Boneyard. Recipient of the Druid Literary Arts Award, West Alabama Arts and Humanities Council, for her body of literary work.
Excerpt
LIFTED
Wanting to attain peerage
in the ranks, like a bird puffing up
against the cold, a little balloon
of insulating air, I cried to the breeze
Lift me
so that I now belong.
I strode from room to room
thinking it over, now here, now
there and over the field to Grandma’s
house for some serious
philosophical conversation.
Grandma was planting
seeds next to the berry bush
and confided to me the sustaining
power of that exercise.
That is all you shall have of structure
today, she said as she carried a plant
to the kitchen window to show me
how well-behaved it was.
Hers was a nice kitchen, but it was not
my kitchen.
Coming up for air between the intervals,
I discovered that something in the realm
of clear thinking, was amiss.
I spied on my own kitchen windowsill
a begonia drawn to the light
for survival.
Its soft petals favored me, lifted and loved me
so that I floated toward the sky,
a little balloon of insulating air.
Author
Irene Mitchell is the author of eight previous poetry collections, most recently My Report from the Uwharries (Dos Madres Press, 2022). Her Selected Poems, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2021. Dos Madres Press has published two other recent collections, Clerestory (2020), and Fever (2019). Mitchell taught Writing, English, and English to Speakers of Other Languages in inner city and rural New York. There she conducted poetry workshops and served as judge in poetry competitions. Formerly poetry editor of Hudson River Art Magazine, Mitchell is known for her collaborations with visual artists and composers. Her poems were set to music for piano and voice in an art-song cycle entitled Past All Doors, which debuted in Stuyvesant, New York. Several of her poems have been executed as broadsides and exhibited ad hoc at local galleries and libraries. Mitchell’s early correspondence with poetry editors and scholars is included in the final year’s collection of The Aylesford Mss., archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library. Mitchell was a recent Associate Artist in Residence with Cornelius Eady at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
