Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 58
- Language: English
- Date Published: Dec. 2016
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-68-6
Praise
I have been an avid reader of Madeline Tiger’s work whose depths of intelligence and feeling have been companion to me for many years. In the Clearing, aptly titled, is a distillation of her oeuvre, possessing an astonishing clarity. In her letting go, these new poems soar, perhaps like one of the birds in her delicately observed garden. Tiger has erected a mythology of our world, of how it breathes, and so she allows us a glimpse into how it is revealed. And while there can be sorrow, even profound grief in it, there is also quiet joy that is completely realized. Her elegance of craft, her turn of thought, are held within a serenity. —Burt Kimmelman
Madeline Tiger’s poems take flight, soaring between the intersections of bird song and jazz. “Velocity leads to survival”, she notes “In the Special Language of Sparrows.” Along her journey she mines the landscape and the past for the metaphors to say the unsayable, arriving, at last, in the light and the clearing. —Jessica de Koninck
Excerpt
Mourning Dove
Behind the light fixture
to the right of
my front door
all night the darkened dove
sits heavily down
in her nest.
At dawn she’ll feed
her little ones,
new doves,
waiting up there
for the light of day.
I’ve seen two little heads not sticking up,
not jutting up but just barely coming
up above the twiggy rim of the nest, their
first home, their first resting place; they must
be newly born, they must be waiting for
something they don’t even know, they just
sense it; and there they are, waiting. Is there
such a thing as understanding or love among
the mourning doves? among any birds or beasts?
What do we know of them? What do we know
of nesting, or of good sense, or of
any living creature’s love.
About
MADELINE TIGER’S recent collections are From the Viewing Stand (2012), The Atheist’s Prayer (2010), and The Earth Which Is All (2008). Her work appears in journals and anthologies; e.g., Adanna, Evening Street Review, Marsh Hawk Review, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Oxford Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet, West Wind Review, and Home Planet News. She is the recipient of many prizes, including the Still Waters Press manuscript prize. She has held fellowships from the N.J. State Council on the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Columbia University School of the Arts. She has been teaching in state programs and private workshops since 1973. She is retired from teaching in high schools and Writers-in-the-Schools programs in New Jersey and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Currently, she gives private workshops for adult writing students. She has lived in New Jersey for many years, in Bloomfield since 2000.
