A lovely package dropped through my post box today - a chapbook of poems written by American poet Anne Grenier. It is handmade, beautifully designed book. My inscribed copy is Number 14 of 111.
I first met Anne when she wrote a poem called Breaking Through, set in Escomb, a Saxon village
near here and we broadcast her poem on our local Bishop FM radio
Ann certainly broke through time with that poem - set more than
a thousand years ago and thousands of miles distant from her Rhode Island Home.
I am delighted to see that this poem finds a place in Ann’s
chapbook Where Time Dropped Me Off.
Many of Ann’s poems reflect on her mindful life in her house among woods and
gardens around her home in Rhode Island. She writes from what she calls ‘a
restless alchemy of viewpoints`
‘…
A feast in a fire-lit
room full of sparks,
ticking clocks and old leather, burnished
and bruised; pressed together forever in
indent of stars, stamped in bronze with a cross
sealed in a century, haunted and thrilled
by whispering chant and bells of descent
…
(From The
Gamekeeper)
‘…
She’s right. Forget what used to be.
Get out of this musty old shop,
leaving finger prints in the dust.
The only thing alive is a little girl
In a movie world, humming a tune;
A sleeping beauty – a forest of dreams .
A young woman unpacks old memories,
a heat on her back tattooed with thorns
…’
From A Two
Dollar Princess
As a writer of prose fiction where I speculate about time it has been so refreshing to read Ann’s poetry in Where Time Dropped Me Off ' WX
Links for you.
Ann’s Website (Lovely site...)
Thank you, Wendy, for spotlighting my chapbook here on "Life Twice Tasted" (a title I love by the way). I am reading your paranormal novel - An Englishwoman in France - on my new tablet. Just the idea of living in two time periods is intriguing. I wonder how many of us feel we belong in an earlier century.
ReplyDeleteI am really enjoying your writing newsletters. I collect them (and Avril's newsletters as well) in their own folders on my computer for reference and inspiration when I am having trouble focusing and need a spark of encouragement. I thank you again. I am grateful for the feeling that I have two kind and talented writing friends in England.
Ann
I too have enjoyed this chapbook of Ann's beautiful poems and I think in answer to her question, there are many of us who feel we've lived or belong in another time and perhaps another place far from where we are now. Ann's exploration of this and her 'restless alchemy,' of viewpoints - the young are so often present in her work - give these poems their haunting, timeless quality. They speak to us all of other lives - lives twice, perhaps thrice tasted.
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