Seed Across Snow - Softcover

Driskell, Kathleen

4.63

27 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597091502 ISBN 13: 9781597091503

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2009

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Just as spring struggles to break through late winter, in Kathleen Driskell's new poetry collection, Seed Across Snow, understanding attempts to thaw untended griefs, long dormant. In colorful lyric and complex narrative, Driskell's poems center on recent tragedies surrounding her family's home in an old church rumored to be haunted: a neighbor nearly killed while fetching her mail, a girl abducted and left for dead on the highway behind her house, the drownings of two boys in a local creek. Poems are bound, too, with old sorrows from her past. Each memory that surfaces while living in the old church with its small graveyard next door, reminds that the most sacred, the family, is also the most fragile.

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About the Author:

Award-winning poet and teacher Kathleen Driskell serves as the Associate Program Director of Spalding University s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is Associate Professor of Creative Writing.She is the author of one previous book of poetry, Laughing Sickness (in its second printing), and the editor of two anthologies of creative writing.Her poems have appeared in many nationally known literary magazines including North American Review, The Southern Review, and The Greensboro Review. Kathleen lives with her husband and two children in an old country church built before the Civil War."

Review:

Early in Seed Across Snow, Kathleen Driskell asks “what do we have but the past to parent us?”—and the poems show us myriad lessons in mortality and humility learned from tending to memory and its various complexities. But Driskell is also concerned with the present and its “hurtful glory,” the natural world, children, and family. Her poems about love in the context of a long marriage, something all too rarely experienced and even more rarely well expressed, are finely wrought and particularly beautiful. Mining the domestic to find in the most ordinary closet or attic figurative richness, Driskell writes with formal poise, precision, and spirited wisdom. —Claudia Emerson (author of Late Wife, winner of the Pulitzer for Poetry in 2006) Kathleen Driskell’s audacious and complex Seed Across Snow is a stunning book. Reading Driskell’s poems is like looking into the luminous wonder of a shell or a feather, so straightforwardly identifiable yet so mysterious in its formation. She writes of the terrifying danger of the ordinary, loved ones in daily situations that could threaten their existence—or change the world. Driskell makes a poetry of emergencies alternating with a deep appreciation of those moments in life when all is well. With humor, sass, a luxuriance of line and a sense of our interior worlds so sure that she can follow a thread of feeling to a knot of thought and back through the thought to feeling again, Kathleen Driskell gives us important poetry, brilliant and necessary.
—Molly Peacock (The Second Blush, Norton 2008)

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