Overview

Jeannie Gambill's Orange-Rose and Shadow is a tribute to her mother's twenty year experience with Alzheimer's disease. Through poetry, we witness a journey of ambiguous loss - cycles of presence and absence, of clarity and confusion, of grace and grief. The landscapes of Southeast Georgia and West Texas add gradation of memory, both the mother's and the poet's.

Full Product Details

9798888380420

Table of Contents

Reviews

At dusk, its striking colors are made even more attractive as evening shadows settle. This is apparent in Jeannie Gambill's Orange-Rose and Shadow, dedicated to her mother and her long struggle with Alzheimer's disease-the beauty and darkness of that long artery of illness borne through the evening light of two worlds. In the poems, we see that personality and language may be broken by the disease, yet the loved one still remains a presence whose ways of knowing have changed. And at death, she is made whole again, through the intervention of a divine potter, who cements the pieces with gold, making strong seams to emphasize the mother's life, fully and wholly lived. Jeannie Gambill's poems map for us a brilliant geography of living and dying, honestly portrayed through pain and brokenness that transform to wholeness in another realm.-Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide and The Bright Obvious Illness is often compared to a war fought within the human body, but in Orange-Rose and Shadow, Jeannie Gambill traces the nuances of her mother's journey with Alzheimer's Disease with beauty, equanimity, and grace. These poems filter color as does stained glass, and we feel the depth of loss and love in all its facets.-Robin Reagler, author of Into The The, Dear Red Airplane, and Teeth & Teeth which was selected by Natalie Diaz as winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize Jeannie Gambill has written a remarkable collection witnessing her mother's journey through Alzheimer's as an un-naming, a slow movement into not knowing-/ as you and I think of knowing. I've never read such an accurate, expansive, moving exploration of the complicated grief that comes from losing a loved one over two decades. Like Paul Celan and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gambill understands how difficult it can be for language to hold the entirety of our love and our sorrow. While her slow, lush descriptions make the world around us, her torqued syntax and remade words move us past the edge of experience. We enter something truly deep alongside the speaker, who inhabits all times at once: childhood and connection, loss and losing, grace and grief. Through poetry as fugue, the mother- now moved through / to another light -is called back, and her presence shimmers for us in the reading.-Sasha West, author of Failure and I Bury the Body

Author Information

Jeannie Gambill was recipient of the Dana Award for Poetry. She was a winner in the ARTlines Ekphrastic Poetry Competition and was a finalist in the Ruth G. Hardman/Nimrod Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Cenizo, Gulf Coast, Plainsongs, Voices de la Luna, and anthologized in The Weight of Addition: An Anthology of Texas Poetry (Mutabilis Press), Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press), and other anthologies. She lives in Bellaire, Texas, but frequents a rustic cabin at the edge of Sam Houston National Forest. She can be reached at jeanniegambill@comcast.net.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available