Description
- Kind: Paperback
- Pages: 44
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-67-1
Praise
Madeline Tiger explores the powerlessness and the strength of girlhood with scrupulous attention to detail. In From The Viewing Stand she is the child observer, bewildered and sometimes hurt by events and adults around her. In each poem she deftly captures a tone of both innocence and experience –how the child feels, what the adult knows. Like “The Weeping Cherry Tree,” the poems in this memoir-like collection both “weep” and “burst”.—Jessica G. De Koninck
…from early childhood to young adulthood, to the mature poet immersed in the solace-making of her poem’s words: where the child and finally, we, her readers, are brought to bear witness to what it is to be kept at a distance from any natural familial warmth. Where the only antidote is to bring us back from the viewing stand into the heart’s dark undertow of poems always pulling on us, always about to take us under, far from any safe shore. Here the child, through the poet she becomes, learns her craft, her irony’s survival skills, even “… how good it feels / to be all alone in the sun in the deep cold.” —Robert Murphy
Excerpt
THEY SAID GIRLS
COULDN’T BUILD IGLOOS
– after Marie Howe
…She was never proud of us,
never before or after
that day, but that day she,
of all people— patroness of rules
and regulator of meals, parser-out of
afternoon snacks, she
from in the big brick house, in the back
somewhere, not the kitchen, maybe
the sun parlor, it must have been a bleak day,
maybe from upstairs— from her chaise lounge
(to the left at the top of the stairs,
the spindles and balustrades so still and cool
like the lines between don’t and do) she
for that one time broke the rules, and somehow
there, in our warm snug igloo that we had just
built ourselves, were –on a small plate from the pantry–
Oreos….
Author
Madeline Tiger’s most recently published collections are The Earth Which Is All(2008) and Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000(2003). Her work appears regularly in journals and anthologies. She has been teaching in state programs and private workshops since 1973 and has been a “Dodge Poet” since 1986. She has five children and seven grandchildren and lives in Bloomfield, NJ under a weeping cherry tree.
