The Pattern Maker's Daughter: Poems

On The Pattern Maker�s Daughter

It�s not easy to write narrative and lyric poems that are individually strong and also coalesce into something more than themselves--a "third body" as Robert Bly has argued. But Sandee Gertz Umbach has done such with her heart-intelligent poetry in The Pattern Maker's Daughter. Umbach employs a woman speaker who unsentimentally looks at (through the particular lens of epilepsy) the people and neighborhoods in the hardscrabble mill town of Johnstown, PA. Most importantly, Umbach's poems reveal how the geographic and geological landscapes have put this town in a precarious position, isolated and prone to many disastrous floods. By the book�s end, we truly care about the plights of the families in Johnstown, the ones that have been able to endure the unpredictable power of nature and those who, sadly, were swept away by that power.

Her poems remind me of that Robert Frank�s classic, haunting photograph of gauzy curtains blowing in a window that overlooks a grimy mining town, a town like Johnstown, where beauty blends with boredom, and desire is wedded to entrapment.

-Thom Ward

Sandee Gertz Umbach was born and raised in the tiny Borough of

Dale, a urban �island� surrounded by the City of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Here, she found endless inspiration as an adult writer and poet. She has worked

for a news magazine in Washington, D.C. where she lived for several years

before moving to Elmira, New York, and eventually settling south of

Pittsburgh in Washington, PA, where she and her husband Paul raised two

boys who both enjoy writing. Her son, Jordan, caught the bug for "steeltown

lore" and is a singer/songwriter with many songs reflecting Western

Pennsylvania heritage.

The author is a Commonwealth Speaker with the Pennsylvania

Humanities Council where she leads poetry workshops that focus on a sense

of place. She founded and President of the award-winning non-profit arts

center, The Washington Community Arts and Cultural Center in Washington,

PA which provides fine arts programming for children and youth. Each summer,

she returns to Dale Borough to the Dale Valley Arts Center where she teaches

poetry to children in a program she developed entitled "My Own Backyard."

She has a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing from the Wilkes University Low-

Residency Program and is currently an M.F.A. candidate. She received a poetry

fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 2000.