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author interview
sample
poems:
Loss Calls the Cops
Train Whistle
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A
Necklace of Bees
Poems by Dannye Romine Powell
Probing
the nature of loss—actual and feared
With a
quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell’s third collection
probes the nature of loss—loss that's actual and loss
that's feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With
its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in
secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling
of loss and "calls the cops / to say his best friend
/ went fishing and won't answer his phone." Often, the
poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after
attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman's husband
has a history of infidelity. There's also the loss of romantic
love, as when the woman "pulls / toward shore, a shore
she calls by a name / she swore she'd never breathe again."
At the heart of this collection, however, is the poet's dread
of losing an alcoholic son, a son whose anticipated death
provokes the poet into a dialogue with "Mrs. Caldwell,"
the fictional hero of Camilo Jose Cela's novel, Mrs. Caldwell
Speaks to Her Son. The poet chides Mrs. Caldwell, who
mourns her son Eliacim's death at sea, while at the same time,
she aligns herself with her: "Certain words, Mrs. C.,
we mothers must not utter / to our sons. I keep a list. Slippers
is one. Lilac another. Wreath. Tremble,
Perfumed. Silk. Flutter. And, barefoot,
of course."
This fear of loss prompts the poet to consider how she might
tell her alcoholic son's young daughter of his death, should
it happen. "Perhaps I should begin today," she muses,
"stringing / her a necklace of bees. When they bite /
and welts quilt her face, when her lips / whiten and swell,
I'll take her by the shoulders. ‘Child, listen to me.
/ One day, you'll see. These stings / are nothing. Nothing
at all.’"
“Dannye Romine Powell’s luminous new poems seem
places we’ve all been, made of words we wished we had
said: where we take the dead shopping, where Loss is made
flesh, and where a son and a garden teach us too much about
sacrifice. Bravo!”
—Alan Michael Parker, author of Love Song with Motor
Vehicles
“The poems in A Necklace of Bees are lyrical,
passionate, intimate, and nervy, and they respect the complex
reality of love. They do not gloss; they do not lie. They
tell the beautiful, painful truth.”
—Kelly Cherry, author of Hazard and Prospect: New
and Selected Poems
Dannye Romine Powell is the author of two
books of poetry, At
Every Wedding Someone Stays Home and The
Ecstasy of Regret, both published by the University
of Arkansas Press, and Parting the Curtains: Interviews
with Southern Writers. The Ecstasy of Regret
won the Brockman-Campbell Award and the Oscar Arnold Young
Award and was a finalist for the Southeastern Booksellers
Association Poetry Award. Powell writes on life in Charlotte
and the Carolinas for the local section of the Charlotte
Observer. She was the newspaper’s book review editor
for nearly twenty years.
July
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 100 pages
$16.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-879-0 | 1-55728-879-8
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