|
Old Age and Young Hearts
Editors: Judie Rae and Ellen Reynard
36 Poems ~ 57 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Kelsay Books
ISBN: 9781639802944
To Order: Amazon Books at $23, or
Kelsay Books at $20
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Old Age And Young Hearts is a chapbook that deals with complexities of aging. Written by women poets over sixty, it examines the delights as well as the difficulties of growing older. The pain of losing lifelong friends, the pathos as well as the hilarity of memory glitches, are all part of this collection of poems.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Old Age and Young Hearts is a rich collage of women’s poetic voices of experience, at once nostalgic, somber, and quietly hopeful … the poets celebrate lives well lived, regrets and all, and their strength, vitality, and good-heartedness shine through in these fine poems.
–Judy Brackett Crowe, Flat Water: Nebraska Poems
The anthology reveals the complexity of aging through insights from a compelling group of women poets … through poems about the body, memory, awareness of change, and lost things, the reader benefits from the honesty and artistry of women addressing aging with poignancy and humor.
–Kirsten Casey, Nevada County, CA Poet Laureate
What a striking collection of poems by our women elders! Some themes of aging are familiar, others eccentric and vivid with the particulars of a lived life. This is the best anthology of wise women’s work that I have seen since When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple–I highly recommend if for readers of all ages and genders!
–Iven Lourie, Return to Mykonos
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Ellen Dooling Reynard spent her childhood on a cattle ranch in Jackson, Montana. A one-time editor of Parabola Magazine, she is retired and lives in Grass Valley, California. She is the author of two chapbooks, No Batteries Required (Yellow Arrow Publishing), and Double Stream (South Forty Press).
–She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
Judie Rae is the author of the novel, The Haunting of Walter Rabinowitz. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them Nimrod, Wisconsin Review, Mudfish. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Weight of Roses and Howling Down the Moon (Finishing Line Press). Her essays have appeared in The Sacramento Bee, as well as online at San Francisco’s NPR station, KQED. Judie taught college English classes for twenty-seven years throughout California. A Canadian, she now lives in Nevada City, California, a landscape reminiscent of her grandmother’s cottage on the Ottawa River, where she spent her childhood summers.
FROM THE BOOK:
A Grandmother’s Blessing
by Gail Entrekin
Thanks for the blossoming trees
in the neighbors’ yard that rain pink
in the wind, and for the little girl running,
pausing to pick up petals gathered
by the breeze into piles by the curbs,
and for the way she tosses them up
and the way the petals flutter down
dotting the swirl of her hair.
Thanks for the girl’s father, smart
and kind, who was born to his father
and me in the nick of time, and for his father
himself, holding up the roof even now
from his worn armchair in the silence
and the dark with his sinewed arms
his bruised and purple hands
that caressed the velvet petals
of the dahlias in the park
and took my heart.
The Swan
by Ellen Reynard
Inspired by a video of an old woman with Alzheimer’s who
remembers dancing Odette in Swan Lake:
The opening chord of Swan Lake
resonates through the room
while an old woman slouches
in her wheelchair, empty-eyed.
Her hands, long tapered fingers,
hang limp and forlorn from her wrists.
An oboe sings the opening melody’s
lyric call. The woman’s right hand
opens, palm up, then falls, inert, to her lap,
her head droops in dejection.
As the full orchestra swells in crescendo,
the woman looks up and lifts her arms,
fluid grace, sweeping gestures,
hands flutter like feathers in the wind,
head turned in regal profile, eyes alight,
as both arms rise above her head.
Her wings catch the wind current–
the swan is in flight.
|
