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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect Mother's Day poetry gift, November 23, 2008
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."
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cosmic imagery and homely down-to-earthness, May 6, 2009
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.'
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