Lit Blue Sky Falling - Softcover

Files, Meg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1646620178 ISBN 13: 9781646620173

Publisher: Finishing Line Press, 2019

Synopsis

From the Galapagos Islands to Iceland to a retirement village barber shop, these poems mingle natural history, memory, and reflections on mortality. They conjure blue-footed boobies, wildfire, coral-adorned underwater sculpture, a post-election Fourth of July, the aurora borealis. They explore life with twin sisters, the enduring presence of the dead, the way wars cascade through lives, the making and meaning of art, and earthly love.

About this title

About the Author:

Meg Files is the author of the novels Meridian 144 and The Third Law of Motion, Home Is the Hunter and Other Stories, The Love Hunter and Other Poems, and Writing What You Know, a book about using personal experience and taking risks with writing. She edited Lasting: Poems on Aging. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Fellowship. She taught creative writing, directed the Pima Writers' Workshop, and chaired the English and Journalism Department at Pima College for many years. She was the James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University and the Doris Leadbetter Writer-in-Residence at Victoria University in Australia. She directs the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and Masters Workshop.

Review:

In Lit Blue Sky Falling, Meg Files is as precise a naturalist as Darwin, whose journey to the Galapagos she retraces in the splendid opening poems. Files’ verse is alive to the poignant changes since Darwin’s time. Tourists now wear “i love boobies” tee-shirts but are shocked to find real boobies dead on the trail—“survival of the fittest” in action, as Files dryly observes. The fate of the last Isla Pinta tortoise, who refuses to mate with a female from a subspecies, is “finally to crawl back alone / beneath the cradle of the earth. The end.” The volume closes movingly with a different kind of journey, one to the far north (Iceland) as Files grieves her father, who recently died. What she discovers is not only the fatalism inherent in the Norse sagas and its people, but also their reverence for earth’s beauty, what she gorgeously describes as the still presence to “green glory.”

—Cynthia Hogue

 

In these poems Meg Files expertly guides us on an exotic journey where on the outer landscape we’ll meet blue-footed boobies, eagle rays, elephant grass and Northern lights; but also on an inner exploration where we find fear, age, love and loss, and wisdom in abundance. These poems are rich with sharply observed details and delicately captured emotion. “Lit Blue Sky” is a terrific trip.

—Peter Meinke

 

In Lit Blue Sky Falling, Meg Files illuminates the origin and evolution of the complex connections among all living beings. From the Galapagos to Iceland, she follows tracks and sagas to let us all comprehend how we are related—among species, within families, and as part of cherished friendships. These elegant, earthy poems reward each reading with insight, wisdom, and delicious language.

—Peggy Shumaker

About this edition

• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1646620178
• ISBN 13: 9781646620173
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 44