In THE FARMGIRL POEMS, winner of the 2004 Pearl Poetry Prize, Elizabeth Oakes looks back to the mid-twentieth century and her childhood on a farm in rural Kentucky, to “that land now only in my memory.” That land becomes a vital, living force in these poems, inseparable from everything that lives and grows there and from the people who work and draw sustenance from it: her father who “took the world, slit it open, and gave it to us,” her mother whose “hands were folded leaves that opened and bore and gave.” Taking us back to the source of all that feeds and sustains us, Oakes shows us the passing of an American way of life with a straight-forward simplicity that’s as genuine and powerful as it is moving.
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How rare, in this wracked world, to find a wholeness of vision that reflects as it creates a world. --Sallie Bingham, cover blurb
Elizabeth Oakes’ FARMGIRL POEMS are like water: at once plain, essential, and shape-shifting. --George Ella Lyon, cover blurb
After Wordsworth, we can easily say of THE FARMGIRL POEMS, the child is mother to the poet here. --Joe Survant, cover blurb
Elizabeth Oakes’ FARMGIRL POEMS are like water: at once plain, essential, and shape-shifting. --George Ella Lyon, cover blurb
After Wordsworth, we can easily say of THE FARMGIRL POEMS, the child is mother to the poet here. --Joe Survant, cover blurb
About the Author
Elizabeth Oakes teaches Shakespeare and American women poets at Western Kentucky University. She was awarded the 2004 Betty Gabehart Prize at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and is co-founder and co-editor of the Kentucky Feminist Writers Series, which was awarded the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Sallie Bingham Feminist Action Award in 2003.
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I'm a writer, poet, humanist, feminist, and mystic. I'm a farmgirl with a Ph.D. (Shakespeare, Vanderbilt). I used to teach Shakespeare and Women's Poetry at the university level, but now I'm a student of the universe. I live in, when I can, spiritual places like Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona. I do what the muses tell me to.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Spritual simplicity,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Farmgirl Poems (Paperback)
These nostalgic poems have a humble simplicity to them reflective of the land and time they sprung from. They remind me so much of my own childhood, growing up in the country, developing a spiritual connection to the world, humanity, and the cosmos through the land itself. Beautiful.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine Harvest of Fine Poetry,
By Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Farmgirl Poems (Paperback)
I usually find contemporary poetry to be cryptic and deliberately obscure, but this wonderful, moving book of poetry avoided these characteristics while being elusive enough to be evocative, full of feeling, and suffused with moods perceived on the threshhold of the conscious and unconscious. The poems are warm and alive with the varied textures of life in mid-20th century rural Kentucky and yet this very concreteness opens up into the universal themes of the human experience in a quiet, understated manner. It is the mark of true inspiration, talent, and craftsmanship to strike these balances just right like this.
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