Sourdough, applejack and the good vinegars that have places at our tables—for all of these treats, wild yeasts make the starter. Wild yeasts that drift on air currents and land here, land there—then each batch may mother the one that follows. The keynote poem of this book, “Forty Days,” from Make for Higher Ground, seeded many of the ones that come after; the events that created the following memoir poems seeded all the succeeding moments of this life.
The geographic location of the sections “Child’s Play,” Wild Yeast” and “North of Niagara” is the general area of the Great Lakes: southern Michigan and Ontario, northern Illinois, upstate New York. These places shaped the early decades of this poet’s life, the remaining sections came to life during the California years.
The poems in this collection are all in form of one kind or another: accentual or metered or cadenced; blank verse, rhymed verse, some nonce forms. I have experimented with several common patterns such as the sonnet, villanelle and pantoum but also some more unusual ones: rondeau, triolet, ottava rima, terza rima, rhyme royale. Some folks do crosswords and Sudoku —I write in form!
With the first section, Harmonics, the voyager-through-time appreciates her Now, the launch pad into her past. Past, which is never truly over but which is the harmonic that chimes when a vibrating string is touched at just the right place, a nodal point. . .
