Eileen O'Connell

Eileen O'Connell's photo appears courtesy of Melissa McClenin, Jester Photography, Albuquerque, NM. JesterPhotos.com.

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As my publishers and I put the finishing touches on "Visions and Revisions," I realized that now that I'm done writing the book, I have to figure out how to talk about it. This is a problem, and it's Ogden Nash's fault.

Every time I try to identify where this book came from, I remember sitting at the family table in our southeast Albuquerque garage-turned-dining-room as my father holds a thick, boring-looking book with a slate-blue-shading-into-turquoise cover. Dad starts to read: "The one-L lama, he's a priest...."

It was punny. It was funny. I wanted to read it again. That encounter with "Verses from 1929 On" is my first memory of being introduced to a poet, getting hooked, and doing research to find more poems. I did the same thing with Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost in my mother's copy of "A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry." And later when I read Gwendolyn Brooks's "Rudolph is Tired of the City."

My identity in miniature: Read! Connect! Research! Reflect! Write! Find a new poet, find a new source of words for the wordless, consolation, laughter and hope. Fast forward 35 years from that Ogden Nash encounter, and here I am with my own poems ("Versus From 1989 On"), some essays to connect them and a hope that "Visions and Revisions" offers you some of the laughter, hope and consolation my own favorite poets bring to me.