Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 82
- Language: English
- Date Published: August 2015
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-37-2
Praise
In Ashes and All Marjorie Deiter Keyishian invites us to pay attention to both the natural and human world. Rooted firmly in the Imagist tradition, these poems are perfectly formed and polished gems to be read and savored. This is a beautiful and comforting book. —Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Ashes and All is a graceful and quietly thoughtful collection of verse that more than succeeds in embracing the essentials of a life. It does so with a reader’s sense that there is a mind at work behind the words, observing the world. —Burt J. Kimmelman
Marjorie Keyishian doesn’t write about anything special. Just wind and water, trees and sky, birds and fish, family and friends, day and night, life and death. Just what matters most to us. What she says about them has not been said before. If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is. This slender book contains volumes. —Peter Blauner
Accessible but not easy, supple with surprises, a knowledgeable celebration of nature (including humanity), the poems collected in Marjorie Deiter Keyishian’s Ashes and All answer the question – via themselves, via their song – that one of the poems begins by posing, “What is better than a clean white page?” It is a ship like a squat grandmother sailing the Hudson… “as fall turns to winter and darkness/threatens to take more…” It is the reflected rhythm of the heart beating, the wind blowing… It is all that – Ashes and All – and more. Lyrical, rhythmic, and sensorially, beautifully evocative, these fifty-three poems about the living, departed, and what remains will refresh your sense of language and your spirit. —Thomas E. Kennedy
Excerpt
December Thirty-One
The year is falling apart. Each year does
will us to die with it. We must invoke
the gold we know: moonlight as lucid
as silver foil, wax candles as gold,
as red, as the sun once was, long days ago.
If we wake early, it is to darkness.
The real children must be told it’s morning.
Light comes later, and then it’s thin, watery,
unconvincing—a brief interval
in a continuum which is the night,
naturally black; the holes that are stars
too far gone to be more than a story
we invented some time ago, winter’s
infant, in which we must believe, the light.
Author
Marjorie Deiter Keyishian is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Slow Runner (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Demeter’s Daughters (Pudding House Publications, 2010). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Graham House Review, The Literary Review, The Laurel Review, South Mountain Poets, Black Mountain II Review, New York Quarterly, Tiferet, Paterson Literary Review, Snowy Egret, Northeast Journal, The Smith, Outerbridge and The Journal of New Jersey Poets. For many decades, she taught literature and writing courses at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. Born in Brooklyn, New York and married to Harry Keyishian, she has four daughters and seven grandchildren.