Customer Reviews

Milk and Tides

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Milk and Tides...poems by Margaret Hasse. Margaret Hasse is an ecstatic mother and an ecstatic poet. She pays close and loving attention to the small details, the everyday revelations in raising children and making a family. Her son, wearing his Cub Scout uniform, "cups his hand / when he covers his heart / as if he protects / a red butterfly..." When Hasse thinks of her son's birth mother, she wants to "lick him all over / with a cow's thick tongue, / to taste him and mark him as mine..." Hasse watches her sons grow with a sense of stunned awe, while she also dreams of her own deceased mother "My mother strokes my hair, pulls / a strand behind my ear. I wake / to rain on the roof..." Hasse accomplishes in Milk and Tides a form of telescope sleight of hand--telling the whole story of her family and her arrival in surprised middle age, in a lively, funny, and wise book--a book that is lit by joy. (Nodin Press, 76 pp. $16.00) Tim Nolan

Margaret Hasse has done it again. In her long-awaited latest volume of verse, she has combined her life experiences, big heart, keen observations, and poetic gifts to create another memorable book. She brings an honest, fresh, and singular voice to poetry. Highly recommended.

Ann Nelson, Westwood Hills, Kansas

I am neither a writer nor a critic, but I am a lover of poetry. In my humble opinion there are several perfect poems in this lovely collection and one of them is "Basket,River." I feel the pain and beauty of the telling of adoption -- the birth mother placing her baby in the small basket, the big river of life, the safety of the bulrushes and the joy and strength of the new mother as she finds the child and takes him to her. The biblical references are woven expertly and feelingly into the poem. I have given "Milk and Tides" to special relatives and friends and all of them are as pleased as punch to have his/her own copy. Some of the recipients are seniors, like me, and we are especially fond of "Life in Reverse." I highly recommend his book!

MILK AND TIDES is a brilliant new collection from Margaret Hasse, who has written so eloquently in the past about love, nature, ambition, friendship and family. Simple, direct and unforgettable, the poems in MILK AND TIDES take us deep into the joys, terrors, miseries and comforts of family life. The poems are unapologetically female or maybe I mean mammalian--right in the flow of human creaturely life, within the larger natural frame of tides. A tremendous addition to the Hasse ouevre, which includes her earlier books, STARS ABOVE, STARS BELOW and IN A SHEEP'S EYE, DARLING. Readers might want to snatch up a copy--this book has been nominated for a 2008 Minnesota Book Award.