Overview

Ancestors and newborns crisscross these poems, comfortably slip in and out of one another's lives. There are celebrations, elegy, meditations on nature, family, history, science. The poet has created a jazz-like improvisation: voices from the last millennium call to the first quarter of the new and receive messages back. The variety of poetic forms in this short volume share an undercurrent: antidotes from divisive turmoil toward a welcoming rest.

Full Product Details

9798888389164

Table of Contents

Reviews

The poems collected in Alice Timmins's Leaning on a Blue Door forge subtle connections between the present and the past, the personal and collective, the natural and technological. Poems about a beloved's struggle with Alzheimer's, and another about the fate of the Voyager spacecraft, echo one another in ways that continue to haunt me. Poems about a woman running alone on a back road at dusk, and another about Christine Blasey Ford's sexual assault testimony in 2018, have nothing, and everything, to do with each other. And poems about who and what we are responsible for-our homes and communities-are tied by a dark thread to poems about how we betray one another in small and large ways. What holds all this together? The poet's sympathy for what's fragile, yes, but also her trust that what's true, in and through time, is unbreakable. -Kimberly Cloutier Green, author of The Next Hunger; former Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire Like the many artworks scattered through this beautiful collection, Alice Timmins' poems paint pictures of exquisite grace and light. Her ""bell of awareness"" rings loud on every page, showing meticulous attention to, and celebration of, so many aspects of our glorious lives-love, sickness, birth, death, the joy and pain of friendship, and precise details of the natural world around us. With a well-tuned ear for the music of birds, the ocean, and most of all language itself, she writes intimate slivers of lovely stillness-like catching a finch or butterfly for an instant in your hand. While many of the poems are imbued with a deep sense of rootedness in loving partnership, in family, and in her New England home, the poems of section two blossom out to global and even astronomical perspectives, but with the same intense desire to reveal truth and find compassion. These poems will wake you to wonder and make you stop to listen again and again. -Brian Evans-Jones, former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egan Award from Poets & Writers With color, texture and exquisite detail, this artful collection invites me to see, feel, and practically touch what the author has experienced. Words, like watercolor on the page, invite me into longing, grief and healing; draw me toward fresh fields and earthen pathways; startle me into the ""humble now"" of heart truths I'd practically forgotten. I am grateful for these poems. I think you will be too. -Rev. Ellen Quaadgras, Minister, South Church, Portsmouth, NH

Author Information

Alice Lee Timmins has been engaged in service-oriented careers-In Washington, DC with a women's advocacy non-profit; in Maryland and Colorado as a secondary social studies teacher, and with a Masters Degree in Education and Counseling, she counseled numerous students in various public schools on both sides of the Mississippi River. Her final position was Coordinator of Adult Volunteers at the Denver Art Museum. Now retired to her beloved Maine, Alice writes poetry from a sunny desk at a cottage on the Great Works River in South Berwick. Daily she walks with her partner Margaret and their beloved dog Quincy. She stays extremely active creating textile art pieces, installing art at the Kittery Art Association Gallery, playing pickleball, hiking with artistic and spiritually-minded friends. Alice also spends long afternoons cutting firewood from felled trees on acres of her property's forest floor.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available