Poetry Wednesday 04/01/09

Threads of Hope

by

Shirley Vogler Meister

We are the threads that bind us, 

one to another. We strengthen 

our babies’ swaddling beginnings, 

then loosen the ties so they can 

wiggle in the wind like spring kites 

soaring to new heights, finding 

themselves. We are harmonious, 

sturdy threads carefully woven

into the fiber of society, 

where weak fabric frays. Some souls 

fall through the holes into despair

 and confusion and suffering.

 We who are strong gather together 

to tighten the knots and knit a net 

of safety to catch those falling—

a shawl of comfort to dry their tears

 and wrap their fears in courage.

 We teach them to make their own shawls,

 to become the threads that bind us, 

one to another—with trust, with love.

Link back to the poetry tour on Sans Souci's page

Book Tuesday -03/31/09

Gail Sheehy

Passages

and

 New Passages

(The following reviews are taken from the author's website.  Click on Gail Sheehy's name to go to her website)

Passages (I read Passages back in the early 1980s)

The years between 18 and 50 are the center of life, a time of growth and opportunity. But until now no guide has existed to help us understand the mysterious process by which we become adults.
Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the "Terrible Twos" and the "Noisy Nines." Yet what Gesell and Spock did for children hasn’t been done for us adults. Whenever psychologists do address themselves to adult life, it is in terms of its "problems" – rarely from the perspective of continuing changes through the life cycle. But now a new concept of adult development has begun to emerge.
Gail Sheehy, an author those investigative reporting has won numerous prizes, set herself three objectives in writing this pioneering book: to locate the personality changes common to each stage of life; to compare the developmental rhythms of men and women – which she found strikingly unsynchronized; and, in light of this, to examine the crises that couples can anticipate. Which passages cause one partner to put an extra strain on the other? How do their needs and drams change with age?
Drawing on three years of painstaking research and 115 in-depth interviews, Gail Sheehy goes beyond the academicians to reveal both the internal and external forces acting on all of us. This humane, widescreen view of adulthood speaks eloquently to men and women, to couples and singles, to "wunderkinds" and late bloomers, to careerists and homemakers. It is the only book that brings together a coherent vision of the passages we must all take through the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties toward what is potentially the best of life.

New Passages (I read New Passages two or three years ago)

Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehy’s landmark best seller, Passages, named by a Library of Congress survey as one of the most influential books of our time. In 1995 ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle

People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die – thereby shifting forward all the stages of adulthood by up to 10 years. She traces radical changes for the generations now in the Tryout Twenties and Turbulent Thirities and finds baby boomers in the Flourishing Forties rejecting the whole notion of middle age. In its place Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier – Second Adulthood in middle life.

"Stop and recalculate," she writes. "Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity beyond menopause and male menopause. But we are all a little lost. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood, beginning at 21 and ending at 65, are hopelessly out of date. Sheehy presents startling facts: A woman who reaches age 50 today – and remains free of cancer and heart disease – can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Similarly, men can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. To plot our route across these vast new stretches of Second Adulthood, we need a new map of adult life.

Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages through hundreds of personal and group interviews. Her original insights are borne out by extensive research. New Passages draws on national surveys of professionals and working-class people and fresh findings comparing five generations extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports. Combining the scholar’s ability to synthesize data with the novelist’s gift for storytelling, Gail Sheehy allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us.

New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work awakened and permanently altered the way we think about ourselves, as did the original Passages.
(I heard Gail Sheehy speak a couple years ago at IPFW and she is just delightful)

Poetry Wednesday 03/18/09

Call
by Alla Renee Bozarth

There is a new sound

of roaring voices in the deep

and light-shattered rushes in the

heavens.

The mountains are coming alive,

the fire-kindled mountains

moving again to reshape the earth.

It is we sleeping women

waking up in a darkened world,

cutting the chains from off our bodies

with our teeth,

stretching our lives over the slow

earth,

seeing , moving , breathing in the

vigor

that commands us to make all things

new.

It has been said that while the women

sleep

the earth shall sleep.

But listen! we are waking up and

rising,

and soon our sister will know her 

strength.

The earth-moving day is here.

We women wake to move in fire.

The earth shall be remade.

(I found this little gem in the anthology "at our core: women writing about power" by Sandra Haldeman Martz. Click on the poet's name to read more about her.)

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita's page

Book Tuesday -03/24/09

Plum Lovin'

by

Janet Evanovich

From the authors website:

A Stephanie Plum novel that takes adventure, action, suspense (and maybe even true love?) to new heights...

WATCH YOUR BACK...

LOOK BOTH WAYS...

BECAUSE LOVE IS IN THE AIR...

AND THAT MEANS BIG TROUBLE!

Mysterious men have a way of showing up in Stephanie Plum's apartment. When the shadowy Diesel appears, he has a task for Stephanie-and he's not taking no for an answer. Annie Hart is a "relationship expert" who is wanted for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Stephanie needs to find her, fast. Diesel knows where she is. So they make a deal: he'll help her get Annie if Stephanie plays matchmaker to several of Annie's most difficult clients. But someone wants to find Annie even more than Diesel and Stephanie. Someone with a nasty temper. And someone with "unmentionable" skills. Does Diesel know more than he's saying about Annie Hart? Does Diesel have secrets he's keeping about Stephanie and the two men in her life-Ranger and Morelli? With Stephanie Plum in over her head, things are sure to get a little dicey and a little explosive, Jersey style!

(For those times that I just need some fluff in my life . . . when I need to wrap my arms around my belly and laugh till tears run down my cheeks . . . I reach for one of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels.  They do contain adult humor though so are not for the under aged reader. Click on the author's name to go to her web site and read more about her.)

Poetry Wednesday 03/18/09

Woodstock

by

Joni Mitchell

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
Im going on down to yasgurs farm
Im going to join in a rock n roll band
Im going to camp out on the land
Im going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombersRiding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

(Found in the book "Scanning the Century: The Pequin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry"  edited by Peter Forbes.  Even though technically lyrics,  since they included it as a poem I thought I could too.   I was too young to be a part of Woodstock  but feel it was a significant event of the sixties.  Click on the title to hear Joni Mitchell sing the song and click on her name to read more about her.)

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita's page

Book Tuesday -03/17/09

The Second Sex

by

Simone de Beauvior

Publisher Comments:

This triumphant and genuinely revolutionary book began as an exceptional woman's attempt to find out who and what she was. It ended up shocking, infuriating, and galvanizing millions of readers and dramatically revising the way women talk and think about themselves. Drawing on extensive interviews with women of every age and station of life, masterfully synthesizing research about women's bodies and psyches as well as their historic and economic roles, The Second Sex is an encyclopedic and brilliantly argued document of inequality and enforced "otherness." Forty years later, it retains all of its vitality and passion, while confirming Simone de Beauvoir's stature as one of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century.

(A favorite of mine.  So much so that I named my pet bird after the author.  It has been years since I have read it though so I am overdue for a re read.  Click on the title to find a site to purchase and on the author's name  to read more about her) 

Book Tuesday -03/10/09

The Wednesday Letters

by

Jason F. Wright

From The Website:

Jack and Laurel have been married for 39 years. They've lived a good life and appear to have had the perfect marriage. With his wife cradled in his arms, and before Jack takes his last breath, he scribbles his last "Wednesday Letter." When their adult children arrive to arrange the funeral, they discover boxes and boxes full of love letters that their father wrote to their mother each week on Wednesday. As they begin to open and read the letters, the children uncover the shocking truth about the past. In addition, each one must deal with the present-day challenges. Matthew has a troubled marriage, Samantha is a single mother, and Malcolm is the black sheep of the familywho has returned home after a mysterious two-year absence. The Wednesday Letters has a powerful message about forgiveness and quietly beckons for readers to start writing their own "Wednesday Letters."

click on the book title to learn more about the book and click on the author's name to read more about him

This book has a good idea for its basic story line and it contains lots of thought provoking material in regards to interpersonal relationships.  Unfortunately, in parts of the book, the emotions of the characters become over dramatic, and  it is set in the context of a conservative Christian family causing  the book to become corny occasionally.   Never the less,  the letters are delightful as are the adult children of the deceased couple.   The book ends on a good note except for one problem. (beware of spoiler that follows)  For me,  even fiction has to be somewhat believable.  Toward the ending of this novel,  we are to believe a convicted rapist,  who becomes religious during his time in prison,  is released and becomes a pastor, serving the family of his victim.   Even if I was told that a religious body ordained a person who had been a sex predator,  reformed or not,  I would not accept that it was appropriate for such a person to be in a leadership position for a group of people that consisted of women and children.  Forgiveness is one thing.  Being stupid is quite another.  I feel it is a slap in the face of people who have been victims to have their experience minimized in this way.  I also feel it is endangering other would be victims who would read such a novel as inspirational and interpret it to mean that it was acceptable to have their children, them self or wife be working closely with a person with this type of history.  I realize the point of the book is forgiveness.   Certainly it is a novel that could facilitate a lively discussion on when forgiveness is or is not possible and when reconciliation is or is not appropriate.  

Back to Book Tuesday!

Poetry Wednesday 03/11/09

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth 
by Pam Ayres

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth, 
And spotted the perils beneath,
All the toffees I chewed, 
And the sweet sticky food,
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

I wish I'd been that much more willin' 
When I had more tooth there than fillin'
To pass up gobstoppers, 
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin'.

When I think of the lollies I licked, 
And the liquorice allsorts I picked,Sherbet dabs, big and little, 
All that hard peanut brittle,
My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My Mother, she told me no end, 
"If you got a tooth, you got a friend"
I was young then, and careless, 
My toothbrush was hairless,
I never had much time to spend.

Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, 
I flashed it about late at night,
But up-and-down brushin' 
And pokin' and fussin'
Didn't seem worth the time... I could bite!

If I'd known I was paving the way,
To cavities, caps and decay,
The murder of fiIlin's 
Injections and drillin's
I'd have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,
And I gaze up his nose in despair,
And his drill it do whine, 
In these molars of mine,
"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

How I laughed at my Mother's false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath,
But now comes the reckonin' 
It's me they are beckonin'
Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita's page

Book Tuesday -03/03/09

...And Ladies Of The Club

by

Helen Hooven Santmyer

Summary (From the publisher):

Set in a small Ohio town and spanning over sixty years, "...And Ladies of the Club" centers on the members of a book club and their struggles to understand themselves, each other, and the tumultuous world they live in. It is an intimate portrait of small-town life, a celebration of the unbreakable bonds of friendship, and a fascinating exploration of how historical events shape individual lives.

(I started to read this novel when I was a member of a ladies reading club before I moved from the community I lived in prior to this one.   It is a long book and between working full time and taking care of my family,  I would pick it up when on vacation or sick with the flu.   I finally completed it about four years ago,  and cried alligator tears at the end.  Many of you may have already read it as it was quite popular in the 1980s.  If not,  you really should not miss the enjoyment of reading this novel. Don't forget to click on the author's name to read more about her!) 

Back to Book Tuesday!

Poetry Wednesday 03/04/09

Wild Peavine

by 

Robert Morgan

I have never understood how
the mountains when first seen by hunters
and traders and settlers were covered
with peavines. How could every cove
and clearing, old field, every
opening in the woods and even
understories of deep woods
be laced with vines and blossoms in
June? They say the flowers were so thick
the fumes were smothering. They tell
of shining fogs of bees above
the sprawling mess and every bush
and sapling tangled with tender
curls and tresses. I don’t see how
it was possible for wild peas
to take the woods in shade and deep
hollows and spread over cliffs inhanging gardens and choke out other
flowers. It’s hard to believe the creek
banks and high ledges were that bright.
But hardest of all is to see
how such profusion, such overwhelming
lushness and lavish could vanish,
so completely disappear that
you must look through several valleys
to find a sprig or strand of wild
peavine curling on a weedstalk
like some word from a lost language
once flourishing on every tongue.

(click on the title of the poem to go to a site where the poet is reading his work and click on the poets name to read more about him)

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita's page