Moods of Motherhood: thirty poems by award-winning poets Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson, with original photography by May Lattanzio. A beautifully presented, tender and strikingly original gift book, ideal for Mother's Day or any day when you want to celebrate the notion of motherhood in its broadest sense.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
This little chapbook in the Celebration series of poetry chapbooks is coauthored by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Carolyn Howard-Johnson Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews, and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry and fiction. Magdalena holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from CCNY (New York), an MBA from Charles Sturt University (NSW), and has studied literature on a postgraduate level at Oxford University (UK) and marketing at Newcastle University (NSW). She lives in on a rural property in New South Wales with her husband and three children. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and two poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup. Carolyn Howard-Johnson's first novel, This Is the Place, won eight awards. Her book of creative nonfiction, Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered, won three. An instructor for UCLA Extension's world-renown Writers' Program, she has several how-to books for writers to her name. Her chapbook of poetry Tracings, was named to the Compulsive Reader's Ten Best Reads list and was given the Military Writers' Society of America's Silver Award of Excellence. She is the recipient of the California Legislature's Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community's Character and Ethics Committee awarded her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly's list of 14 "San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen." Carolyn’s website is www.HowToDoItFrugally.com . She blogs writers resources at Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites pick www.sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com. Visit Magdalena's website at http://www.magdalenaball.com and The Compulsive Reader at http://www.compulsivereader.com/html May Lattanzio's photographs illustrate the book. She is not a stereotypical grandmother. She is a freelance writer, a poet, author, an animal and nature lover. When she first went digital ('cause she couldn't use a viewfinder anymore), she took her camera out onto her acres in NW Florida, concentrating on the many insects. Her websites are: http://inkedin.ning.com/profile/Maziel www.thelensflare.com/u_may.php, www.jpgmag.com/people/maziel. http://maylattanzio.blogspot.com/
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What relationship is more complex or more elemental than the mother-child bond? Abraham Lincoln said, 'All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.' Toni Morrison wrote, 'Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.'
Both of those quotes, as well as one by Honore de Balzac at the beginning of SHE WORE EMERALD THEN, perfectly describe this collection of poems by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball---poetry that catches at your soul. Both of them reprise their poems from Ball's QUARK SOUP, Howard-Johnson's TRACINGS, and their joint collection, CHERISHED PULSE. Fans of CHERISHED PULSE will be pleased to learn that the poets continue to write poems that don't sound either like banal Hallmark cards or the bitter-at-dysfunctional-family jeremiads that habitually torture MFA writing workshop participants.
The two poets complement each other (with words accompanied by stunning photography by May Lattanzio). The opus covers both the grand sweep of the birth of all universal life and the private universe populated by only an adult daughter watching her mother struggle to eat dinner and remembering how her mother washed her one slip. While Ball explores the cosmic continuum and traces us all back to the mother spark that set the stars burning, Howard-Johnson concentrates her portraiture on the deeply personal. But Ball also talks about the oxytocin haze of giving birth and her mother vomiting from cancer drugs. To quote the last poem in the collection, 'Hallmark Couldn't Possibly Get This Right.' When you read about the tough love of the universe or Ball's sienna childhood photograph or Howard-Johnson's mother forgetting her name, you want to cry and hug your mother (and your children, if you have them), because they capture the eternal tug of war between joy and sorrow in the mother-child bond."
Both of those quotes, as well as one by Honore de Balzac at the beginning of SHE WORE EMERALD THEN, perfectly describe this collection of poems by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball---poetry that catches at your soul. Both of them reprise their poems from Ball's QUARK SOUP, Howard-Johnson's TRACINGS, and their joint collection, CHERISHED PULSE. Fans of CHERISHED PULSE will be pleased to learn that the poets continue to write poems that don't sound either like banal Hallmark cards or the bitter-at-dysfunctional-family jeremiads that habitually torture MFA writing workshop participants.
The two poets complement each other (with words accompanied by stunning photography by May Lattanzio). The opus covers both the grand sweep of the birth of all universal life and the private universe populated by only an adult daughter watching her mother struggle to eat dinner and remembering how her mother washed her one slip. While Ball explores the cosmic continuum and traces us all back to the mother spark that set the stars burning, Howard-Johnson concentrates her portraiture on the deeply personal. But Ball also talks about the oxytocin haze of giving birth and her mother vomiting from cancer drugs. To quote the last poem in the collection, 'Hallmark Couldn't Possibly Get This Right.' When you read about the tough love of the universe or Ball's sienna childhood photograph or Howard-Johnson's mother forgetting her name, you want to cry and hug your mother (and your children, if you have them), because they capture the eternal tug of war between joy and sorrow in the mother-child bond."
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The poems
overall grabbed me but I was particularly moved by these two:
Carolyn's poem, Mother in December, brought tears to my night time reading. I could feel the emerald gown against my skin, reach for the covered buttons clasped in their satin loops and see the rhinestones in her mother's ears as she lay abed.
I was particularly moved by "Mother and Daughter, The Thing I learned from Depends..."
as we had my nearly 95-year-old mother here for Passover yesterday. She arrived in her wheelchair via the medical transport service, with a plastic bag carrying an extra depends, just in case...
"I await her word, rather than cut her roast beef..." your line stayed with me as I placed mom's dinner in front of her.
And then came the ending to the poem revealing that Carolyn's mother had forgotten her name.
So tenderly put.
Thank you to Carolyn for sharing herself -- and your mother -- through these poems.
overall grabbed me but I was particularly moved by these two:
Carolyn's poem, Mother in December, brought tears to my night time reading. I could feel the emerald gown against my skin, reach for the covered buttons clasped in their satin loops and see the rhinestones in her mother's ears as she lay abed.
I was particularly moved by "Mother and Daughter, The Thing I learned from Depends..."
as we had my nearly 95-year-old mother here for Passover yesterday. She arrived in her wheelchair via the medical transport service, with a plastic bag carrying an extra depends, just in case...
"I await her word, rather than cut her roast beef..." your line stayed with me as I placed mom's dinner in front of her.
And then came the ending to the poem revealing that Carolyn's mother had forgotten her name.
So tenderly put.
Thank you to Carolyn for sharing herself -- and your mother -- through these poems.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a collection of poetry that movingly illustrates many aspects of motherhood and, if you are a poetry lover, there is much that you will find appealing and thought-provoking. In the first half of the book, the poems by Magdalena Ball have a cosmic quality to them and some wonderful imagery. In the poem 'Coil of Life', for example, giving birth is described as the 'Big Bang' and in 'Assault by a Black Hole', the reader is taken on a journey from the sublime to the commonplace and you can't help but smile:
A powerful jet from a black hole
is blasting nearby galaxy 3C321
with outrageous galactic violence
x-rays, gamma rays
particles travelling the speed of light
tearing ozone layers
destroying alien life forms
and breeding new star systems
a million primordial sons
in the lethal pummelling.
Talk about tough love.
In the face of that million year
assault
(a fraction of the system's lifetime)
I suppose I have no right
to complain
about one smart, sharp smack
sent my way
to facilitate a few manners.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poems have, by contrast, a homely down-to-earthness which also appeals. I loved her description of dandelion petals in the poem 'Dandelions in Autumn':
Yellow petals, pollen-soft
like monarchs' wings.
Little lions' manes
like illustrations in childrens'
books, not like roaring
Serengeti cats
or the MGM logo lion, harmless
these. I pick them, bunch them,
hold them under Mama's chin
to see if they light her throat
yellow, and if they do, delight!
In the poem 'Musing Over a New Calendar', the author reflects on the passage of time - how there is still so much she wants to do and see, yet her ageing mother is 'alone, rejecting all but her home'. I felt the author's pain in these lines as I did in the poem 'Mother and Daughter' where she describes her job of 'mothering again', but this time it is not her children who need her help but her own elderly mother:
...I take over seatbelt
duties, step ahead of her then stop,
reluctant for her to know she's slow.
We all forget names, I say as numb
moves from hand to heart
because it is my name she has forgotten.
Yet, despite such painful memories and associations, perhaps the strongest is the 'eternal warmth' of our mother's bed - as Ms. Ball puts it - 'a shared space/ free from the ticking illusion/ of time, motion and change./ Here, where you are always welcome/ nothing matters/ except this peace/ this place/ containing every possible now.'
A powerful jet from a black hole
is blasting nearby galaxy 3C321
with outrageous galactic violence
x-rays, gamma rays
particles travelling the speed of light
tearing ozone layers
destroying alien life forms
and breeding new star systems
a million primordial sons
in the lethal pummelling.
Talk about tough love.
In the face of that million year
assault
(a fraction of the system's lifetime)
I suppose I have no right
to complain
about one smart, sharp smack
sent my way
to facilitate a few manners.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poems have, by contrast, a homely down-to-earthness which also appeals. I loved her description of dandelion petals in the poem 'Dandelions in Autumn':
Yellow petals, pollen-soft
like monarchs' wings.
Little lions' manes
like illustrations in childrens'
books, not like roaring
Serengeti cats
or the MGM logo lion, harmless
these. I pick them, bunch them,
hold them under Mama's chin
to see if they light her throat
yellow, and if they do, delight!
In the poem 'Musing Over a New Calendar', the author reflects on the passage of time - how there is still so much she wants to do and see, yet her ageing mother is 'alone, rejecting all but her home'. I felt the author's pain in these lines as I did in the poem 'Mother and Daughter' where she describes her job of 'mothering again', but this time it is not her children who need her help but her own elderly mother:
...I take over seatbelt
duties, step ahead of her then stop,
reluctant for her to know she's slow.
We all forget names, I say as numb
moves from hand to heart
because it is my name she has forgotten.
Yet, despite such painful memories and associations, perhaps the strongest is the 'eternal warmth' of our mother's bed - as Ms. Ball puts it - 'a shared space/ free from the ticking illusion/ of time, motion and change./ Here, where you are always welcome/ nothing matters/ except this peace/ this place/ containing every possible now.'
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