Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 74
- Language: English
- Date Published: August, 2018
- ISBN 978-1-948017-11-4
Praise
In Garlanding Green, Christine Aikens Wolfe summons worlds of green and the green of creation with a sense of folk wisdom. She writes of relics, spells, and invocations: Pour the dregs of your wine down a rock./The next time you visit the woods/you may find fuzzy moss. With a love of half rhyme and rhythm, these lively poems call upon the reader as spirit maker, worshipping at the daily altar of solitude and kinship: Life is a stew… Maybe I’ll clamp down/and chew my wrist, hide in this cave a while. —Jan Beatty
“I said in one of my poems, ‘Until a woman is an inch from death, she will keep an eye for color.’ Christine Wolfe has such an eye, and every poem in this colorful book proves it.” —Samuel Hazo
Christine and I once taught a workshop for kids that included an exercise on writing using color. And this book is such a delightful romp through green! Some of it is a fun linguistic game but there are places where things turn deadly serious, taking us deeper into that place where “hearts move through space and time.” Like Lorca’s “Romancero Sonambulo,” these poems are ethereal and anchored in reality at the same time. ”Another soul slips into heaven from the earth / while we wend our way toward sunset / next morning, we must trust and arise.” Part fantasy, part myth, part memory, part nature, part spirit—these poems satisfy me in many ways. —Pam O’Brien
Excerpt
34. Night Prowler
Our Isabella’s beautiful as night
when slipping out, she goes for little prey
like crickets, moths, or any tiny mite
that might escape one’s notice in the day.
She squanders sunshine hours fast asleep
on folded laundry or on tousled bed
(she has a reputation, yawn, to keep)
rest is de rigueur, then waking to be fed.
Of petting she is chary, just the ears
please. Jumps from the couch, yes that’s enough,
paces, meows softly, then off she veers
our ebony feline queen with white ruff.
Downstairs to the screen door, see how she flashes,
green eyes a-gleam, dusk! And out she dashes.
Author
Christine Aikens Wolfe, featured in Tupelo Press’ chapbook On Broken Stones: Truchas Poets fall 2015, is published in Poetry Magazine, Blast Furnace, Nerve Cowboy, The Loyalhanna Review, City Paper and more. Her sonnets appear in Sonnetto Poesia, in The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: sonnets in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Persian, and in the on-line anthology: Love and Ensuing Madness published by Rat’s Ass Review. Wolfe is one of thirty poets in Fission of Form, featuring Pittsburgh sculptors, poets and illustrators. She teaches at the Young Writers Institute, is president of Pittsburgh Poetry Society and attends Madwomen in the Attic workshops – fiction and poetry.