In this collection of poetry the author finds, in the character of Scheherazade, a metaphor for what it means to write. The voices of these poems are deeply female, whether they be those of daughters, lovers or mothers; they remind us that the difficult truths of the imagination are rooted in the body. Here are poems that find love and redemption ......
Returning to the scene of his turbulent childhood, a dying man comes to grips with a chilling truth--that his father was never capable of giving him affection. As he looks back on one particular summer, he realizes that much of his will to survive came from the unconditional love and support offered by his grandfather, and it is that heritage, ......
Inheritance of Light is divided into five sections, each containing poems set in a flowing sequence based on similar themes and concerns. Part One is introductory, surreal poems about the art of poetry and the creative process--an intense opening. Part Two contains autobiographical poems about the family, growing up, and ancestors. Part Three is ......
Well-known author of Love Is a Wild Assault and The Divine Average, Elithe Hamilton Kirkland reveals her childhood memories of Christmas. Here are the magical holiday recollections of a five-year-old girl, wide-eyed in the presence of the grandmother's bountiful kitchen, her grandfather's Sacred Harp songbook, and her bachelor uncle's bottle of ......
"In the town where I was born and raised, everyone drove a few miles south to cut a tree. In that dry, windy country few of the cedars grew straight and full, so the major problem was to find the one least lopsided and wind-whipped." Thus A. C. Greene, in "The Too-Big Christmas Tree," tells of a Christmas in the 1920s when his father cut a too-big ......
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1995. The twenty-nine poems in this, Holden's seventh poetry collection, are mainly epistemological, balancing adult desire against adult knowledge, dramatizing with painful accuracy the inevitable dissonance.
Rolando Hinojosa is a Texas writer with his sense of place centered in the Texas Valley, a world in itself and a place recognizable as a discrete community. But Hinojosa's work transcends the regional, transcends the Valley, transcends Texas, while it remains rooted in all three. Hinojosa is treated here from the perspective of his place in the ......
In the summer of 1979 John Erickson learned that Lawrence Ellzey was looking for a ranch hand. "Lawrence and his son Tom had a cow/calf and yearling operation headquartered on Wolf Creek, some twenty-five miles southeast of Perryton, Texas, and I was interested in the job. There were many qualities I admired in the Ellzey family, but the one which ......
