A PRAIRIE TWISTER OF A POET...
NEW EDITION FOR 2009. SHIRLEY POWELL'S OTHER ROOMS.
Shirley Powell is one of a small circle of
poets who astonished New York and other poetry centers in the
1970s and 1980s with a new romanticism that shed modernism with
all its cynical baggage. Lyrical, supernatural, narrative, and
deft in portrayal of characters, Powell's poems startled many
with their freshness, and their sense of being narrated by a timeless
voice.
She is a prairie twister of a poet. Her people and animals
occupy a remembered world of small town and rural America, but
they are real--they breathe, dream, bleed and die. Her ghosts
and demons spring not from myth, but from your grandmother's rocking
chair. This book selects 80 poems from the very best of Powell's passionate,
spooky, romantic, and haunting poems. Other Rooms, first published as a hand-bound book in 1997, has been unavailable for some time, and we are deligjhted to bring it back into print. A Poet's Press Grim Reaper Book, $13.95. 6 x 9 paperback, 112 pp. ISBN 978-0-922558-36-0. Click HERE to order from AMAZON.
From Reviews of Earlier Books by Shirley Powell:
"She offers original visions of country living, strange
tales unadorned with sentimentality... she merges with nature
like a Native American, sensually and wholly, chewing bark of
sycamore, wearing necklaces of shark's eggs, drinking rain pools."
--Dakota Lane, The Woodstock Times
"A book to receive without prejudiced
expectations, letting in its wildness and innocence and rediscovering
your own images of trees, earth, water, 'the moon's clothed brightness'
and snow..."
--Jeanne Fitzgerald, Oxalis
"Who is this superb poet? ... she is capable
of an intense poignancy in reflection, and she is mightily concerned
with what it means to be a human among humans and with what it
means to be a creature among creatures. She hides herself behind
each page...because she is capable of hiding herself... such ability
is power manifest.
--David Castleman, Dusty Dog Reviews
"This is the poetry of softly padded feet...of
coolly driven power, fried dough and shelter that is based in
the sun... their proletarian dignity had me spinning in my stool...They
cancel our obligation to 'night of the living victim' and weaving
a Wordsworthian quilt they open our souls to little and familiar
things. Shirley Powell deftly mists us in nature to break our
bondage to the laundry list of life."
--Bob Tramonte, Home Planet News
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SHIRLEY POWELL'S
ALTERNATE LIVES. NEW EBOOK EDITION.
Poet, novelist, and storyteller Shirley Powell is best known for ghostly tales, turning the American Midwest of her childhood, and the New York of her later years, into spine-tingling, tantalizing stories in prose or verse. Alternate Lives weaves the supernatural and transcendental with a very different strain, retelling the lives of seemingly-ordinary people — people who do not read poems — in sparkling images and words. We meet and grow to understand a shepherd, a wise farmer, a lonely African-American farm wife hidden away by a jealous white husband, a cemetery caretaker, and several urban homeless. There’s always the dark, Chthonic undercurrent, though, as she veins into the very cells of someone frozen in the snow, and another who lived and died in a tree, “leaving my satisfied skeleton wherever scavengers let fall the bits of me.” In another poem she has entered the soil, saying, “I am really gone this time.” The Woodstock Times reviewer cited the book’s “original visions of country living, strange tales unadorned with sentimentality.” The book features montage art illustrations by Mildred Barker.
This is the 247th publication of The Poet's Press. To order the PDF ebook for $2.99, click below.
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