Hydrangea

Each of Hydrangea’s imagistic poems invites us to contemplate our natures. This is a book that teaches us stillness through the soft eyes of a praying mantis and offers us the comfort of winter sparrows, unafraid. Monaghan’s fine lyrical attention listens as “the grass sings its deep song.” These vibrant, gentle, and finely hewn verses take us inside the speaker’s heart to discover truths beyond what is “heavy, broken” and in disrepair to a state of grace where “no one can tell (us) that summer is ending.”

—Eileen Cleary, author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth

Where is this place that Gloria Monaghan takes us in Hydrangea? It is a world lush in with living things of every season: hyacinth, holly bush, Rose of Sharon, sparrows, robins, and “the red stable horses//in the meadow of darkened lavender.” Monaghan plants us firmly in the earth to watch the blue jay, whose “blue, black, and white feathers/connect sky, heaven, and earth.” Hydrangea’s reach goes beyond a seasonal experience, to an emotional, spiritual, and creative realm, peopled with the masters: Rimbaud, Dante, and Keats. Here, Monaghan’s heartbreak and heartache move us “like madness or waves,” while her tender gratitude for “fingers, hair, and body” makes sacred these experiences. Thank you, Gloria Monaghan, for this rich journey beyond “the backstory time and space,” reminding us, again and again, that “the figs are almost in season,/but then it will be August.”

—Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella

In Gloria Monaghan’s Hydrangea, the seasons find purchase in her backyard garden where “the clematis grows tall” and in the driveway’s “series of dead mice.” There is love here, and sadness, in the snow and rain, in the Spring and Autumn, in the “rust smell of (a) creek” in Michigan. I came away with hope, wanting to crawl out of quarantine and dig for mussels with Gloria on Nantasket Beach.

—Michael McInnis, author of Secret Histories