What Brings Us to Water
Poetica Publishing Chapbook Award, 2010
Lois Parker Edstrom
What Brings Us to Water finds its territory in the places of the quiet sacred, where the poet pays her dues to an ever-welcoming Nature, where the rightful flow of life (the adored grandchild who becomes beloved and mother, and now finds herself as adoring grandmother) reasserts itself in poem after poem. Parker Edstrom’s lyrical voice leads the reader through a lifelong narrative, with the eight-year-old child who “saw a charm/of goldfinch lift all at once from the lilac,/gold coins flung into the air” stating decades later “I’ve never recovered”—the ecstatic vision of this world still has her in its gorgeous claws. Lois Parker Edstrom’s poetry reminds us of the wisdom of not trying to recover. Quite simply, we are not meant to.
author of The Habit of Buenos Aires, Tebot Bach, 2010
Lois Parker Edstrom’s What Brings Us to Water is a memory keepsake box in verse. This glimmering collection is filled with the myriad beauties that govern our lives—sorrowing crows, stained glass light, and temperaments of snow. Edstrom’s eloquent language has me reconnecting with my own life, rediscovering joys of my past I’d forgotten. Inevitable and devastating losses are acknowledged here as well, as seen in the ultimate unanswerable question of When Silence Was Enough: “What did you dream and what got away?” The question asked in the title poem is answered by this collection—that we make meaning from the world around us, the places and people in it. Like the farm dog that has a painful encounter with a porcupine, we come to know that joy is “worth the wounds.” What Brings Us to Water reminds us to take time with every precious second of our lives, that when we stir and waken each day “each step is praise / to movement”
author of What Big Teeth
Ordering Information
Book Cost: $10.00
Contact Lois: [email protected]
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