This is the cover of my beautiful new chapbook of poems, published by Red Bird Chapbooks in St. Paul. The book has been in the world for about six months. Slowly it's found readers or I've read from it to various audiences. Now, a poet friend, Margaret Hasse, has written a stunning review. I am dazzled and deeply grateful.

Margaret begins: "I am writing a fan letter to you for The Heart Beat of Wings. It is a very beautiful book with astonishing connections, images, turns of phrase.

"The voice in the poems is reflective, grateful, curious, and quiet. Each of the poems grows large, like a small bird that opens its great wings of flight.

"The book's tone, like life, is a mingling of somberness and bright new awareness and understanding. I liked the contrast between the black blood of the inner body and the red blood when air finds it. The raspberry poem is sensuous and hinted in both a quick reference and the color of the berry toward other poems in the book where the subject of heart-health is more direct.

"The way the 22 poems in the chapbook work together is extremely satisfying. The themes intertwine as in a piece of classical music: homing, where the heart is and how the heart is hurt (literally and figuratively), spirits that fly, birds that fly, a narrator at home and with her ancestors in Italy. The holiness of happy and sad occasions in the cathedral. Death and presence after death of the father, the mother.

"The style is beautiful--airy, yet concrete, rich with images and unusual turns. I liked the slim shift many of the poems are dressed in. The short lines showed off the spare beauty of the language. In the epithalamium, "o my dears," was a perfect call to those being wed, but also to us, the readers. I felt, as a reader, dear to Margot's intimate, confiding voice throughout the book.

"Some of the many delightful things and lines: birds! and more birds! Snow geese, pigeons, redwings, doves, finch, jay; the mother swimming away in water and in death; the hand of the father like a hand broken off a Roman sculpture; the unc fly; "it takes only one hillside/turning its muscled/side to gold," "its spill of joy"; gold and golden--and many more."

What author wouldn't love such a rich panoply of references and appreciation. Thank you a thousand times, dear Margaret Hasse.

To order a copy of the book directly from the publisher use this link:

https://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/content/heart-beat-wings

Margotlog: Remember Hiroshima, the World's First Use of Nuclear Warpons

Margotlog: Remember Hiroshima

This morning (12/4/2017) the Mpls/St Paul Star Tribune published an article by New York Times writer, Nicholas Kristoff: "Latest missle test conveyed a sobering message." Many of us are jumpy at the bellicosity of North Korea and its threats of exploding a nuclear weapon capable of killing a million U.S. citizens. Terrified all of a sudden, I flit through the empty house, and finally dial my friend Jo outside Tampa. Jo is one of my few connections to the generation that survived World War II. She helped care for my father's first cousins, Eleanora and Sadie when they all lived in Dover, Delaware. Eleanora's husband Dick was killed in 1943 when the Japanese torpedoed his ship in the Pacific. Sadie served in the Waves. My mother was a stay-at-home Mom, and my father did war work because his flat feet made him exempt from active duty.

Though I was born in the midst of war, any trace of that seemed to have evaporated by the time I was old enough to understand what it meant. Growing in the 50s and 60s, with jalopies and sex in the front seat, and parents whose incomes allowed us to move to the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, I thought nothing at all about World War II until my uncle Stanley came to visit. He had been a commissioned officer in the Mediterranean as the British and Americans, slowly, very slowly moved into Italy. The only part of his war expeience I heard about had to do with managing tete-a-tetes between Neopolitan prostitutes and American officers. Ah, the joy of the conquoring hero. Those were my war stories.

Now fear of war for the first time lands on my shoulder and clutches at my throat.

At the end of his article about North Korea's nuclean threat, Kristoff writes "let's try talking, rather than risk the first exchange of nuclear weapons in the history of our planet." I stare at these words. Kristoff seems to have forgotten, Hiroshima, the first nuclear decimation of a civilian population in world history. In 1945, soon after U.S. warplanes dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, John Hersey was commissioned by The New Yorker to write a description of the city. In his calm almost uninflected voice, Hersey wrote about six survivors: two doctors, two women, a Protestant clergyman, and a German priest. The New Yorker published this materpiece in one issue. The cover showed ordinary Americans enjoying summertime activities. We have so often wanted to turn aside from whatever threatens our childish sense of well-being

In a June 8th, 2010 article by Jon Michaud appears an excerpt from Hersey's masterpiece:

     Father Kleinsorge went to fetch watr for the wounded in a bottle and a teapot...At a beautiful moon bridge he passed a naked, living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over....When he had given the wounded the water, he made a second trip. This time the woman by the bridge was dead....he heard a voice from the underbrush, "Have you anything to drink?" He saw the uniform....there were twenty men and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks....Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem to as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, "I can't see anything." Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could, "There's a doctor at the entrance to the park. He's busy now, but he'll come soon and fix your eyes....
     ...immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat the fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface of the water. They decided, after some consideration, that it would be unwise.

Hiroshima follows these six survivors through many years. Hersey describes suburbs and inner city. He does not describe the slow rebuilding, though my memory tells me he does chart the six survivors as their extraordinary good fortune sometimes turns into anguish.

Ten years ago, I went as high as I could in Honolulu, where many battleships from World War II remain as warnings and emblems of U.S. participation. The slow, pleasant bus ride up the hills above Honolulu ended a few blocks from a cemetery where were buried American and British war dead. I wanted to find the grave of my dear Eleanora's husband Dick, the husband who never came back, the husband whose death she mourned walking through the midnight streets of Pittsburgh, her mother on one side, her sister on the other.

It is a beautiful cemetery, with a fresh breeze and a vast panorama of blue-green ocean. Close to the ground, the dead lie under small stones, with names and various insignia, identifying their rank and service. They seemed like the tombs of unknowns. All treated alike, all disappeared from the lives they might have had years ago. I wanted to mourn, but I found that I could not. I lay a sprig of wildflowers on Dick's stone and went away. Only now, with fear clutching at my chest do I grasp what Eleanora might have suffered day after day, night after night. No wonder it took her almost a decade to recover. And then she recovered her essential ebulient personality and became a public health nurse whose patients (after various other jobs) became the higher ups in various Washington, D.C. administrations. She watched generals weep and I have no doubt that there was forgiveness but also pain in her care of them.

Margotlog: Glimmering Light - Autumn Melancholy

Margotlog: Glimmering Light - Autumn Melancholy

     "So much has happened," our friendly postman comments as I hand him a bunch letters, "We've changed plans. Taking a cruise that will pass by St. Martin. At least we'll get a chance to see how it's doing after the hurricane." He and his partner had intended to stay on St. Matin. Not possible now after the hurricane has had its way with the island.
     I spend an hour or so writing checks to environment and humanitarian organizations--my monthly attempt to ameliorate blistering heat, ruined crops, rising seas, starving people. My hopes for those I'll never see.  My hopes to help preserve the rainforest.
     What we do when we can do almost nothing at all.
     Outside the window, light glimmers on neighboring trees. The air is alive with green, fading into gold.
     In the mail comes a much-worn copy of Lampedusa's The Leopard. It's been years since I first read this classic of early modern Italian literature, set in the boot of Italy. The beauty and sadness of its fading way of life reminds me of my time in Sicily a few years ago in Erice, a hill town with a splendid view of the ocean and Palermo's giant rock. Did I feel so intensely alive because I believed I was touching the Sicilian part of my heritage, or simply because the view was so extraordinaty? I knew I was lucky to be there, part of a group of American writers selected to participate in a writing conference. But in my typical way, avoiding a full embrace of the accolade I had sought, I snuck out and spent time talking Italian with the custodian of an ancient church near our quarters.
     Writing is largely drudgry, with occasional bursts of inspiration that send you over the edge. Keats wanted to melt into the nightingale's darkening song. With his talent, mabye he did. Yet. poor man, when he was dying in an apartment beside Rome's Spanish Steps, he asked to be carried outside, simply to experience people walking, chatting, picking over vegetables for sale.
     

Margotlog: I Fell in Love with John Adams

Margotlog: I fell in Love with John Adams.

There are some classic books that I reach for when I'm uncertain if I want to live or die, or life seems so nasty and brutish I almost can't bear being human. These fluctuate, a rock and roll of moods and and helps, meaning tips on how to live. Right now, I'm rereading John Adams by David McCullough.

Who knows why we chose certain books? I was swapping bound copies of books I'd enjoyed over the years for books on disk. This many-disk volume seemed absolutely right. McCullough won the Pulitzer Prize for this book. I love American History. My father taught American History. Not the Puritans, heaven forbid. Or the trek westward which makes me want to grind in my heels and refuse to move. No, I want a town, an ocean to look across to the "old world," and a character so lively that in this fine rendition, he pokes and snorts right off "the page."

He was small of stature, five feet something to Jefferson's six feet three or four. They would be elected as the second duo to lead the new nation, but it's the material before Adams left Braintree that charms me the most. Imagine a town called "Brainstree." A brain with many-branches, stoked by a busy pen that scratched its intelligence every chance it got. Adams kept voluminous journals, in the style of New England worthies. But he wasn't "worthy" in that sense, not a minister. He was a lawyer, and suffered small disgraces before getting it right.

His early infatuations were also rather silly. When he met Abigail and her sisters, he was not originally impressed. She did not flirt like other young ladies who'd entranced him. Yet with time, he came to count on her steady intelligence, her perserverence, and the flame she lit which kept burning in the letters where she addressed him as "My Dearest Friend." He'd been advised not to marry young, and indeed he kept her waiting for years, something of the opposite of the woeful knight, palely loitering.

It was his insistent, masterly writing, his journal-keeping in the New England style, where he cringes or chortles, strides or creeps away--this honest, salty self-assessment day after day that makes his story so appealing. Yes, once he married Abigail, once he took horse to Philadelphia for the first and second Continental Congress, once the affairs of independence consumed all his time and left little for his pen, then he became the politician and leader worthy to guide a new country through some especially perilous times. But it's Adams the individual man, not necessarily the political leader that David McCullough brings so enticingly to life. As president, it was only his quiet resistance to war-mongering against the French or the English that struck me as a kind of genius. He waited. He did not denouce or champion. He waited to see what would transpire. Eventually the French offered a treaty. Eventually, the war against Britain, the war of 1812, subsided. He lost the next election to Jefferson and retired to Braintree.

By this time, Abigail had more than come into her own. As they lived together in Philadelphia, the capital of the new nation, she became so involved in political affairs that residents bowed to her on the street. Always his advocate, she did not shirk from voicing her own opinions. I like very much what I read of her, and mourn her rather early death back in Braintree, so ill the doctors would not let her speak, She died "aware of herself up until the very end."

Her husband mourned her, but his life continued, full of long walks and rides on horseback. Of managing his farm. Of watching his son John Quicy become fit material for the presidency. It's Adams as the old man who also appeals to me. He is writing his diary again, reading, farming, riding. I imagine him facing the ocean and taking stock, day after day, as his life lengthened. He had made much of himself but in the salty, gregarious, tempered manner of a fine, lawful, intelligent man. The more I think of it, the more I believe we were very very lucky to have him as our second president.