Mama's Promises: Poems - Softcover

Nelson, Marilyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080711250X ISBN 13: 9780807112502

Verlag: Louisiana State University Press, 1985

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Nelson Marilyn Waniek Marilyn Nelson

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Reseña del editor:

"Waniek is a poet of intelligence, passion, and gentleness with a fine sense of the comic and unfailing judgment about what constitutes a poetic line. She creates a rich mixture of impressions about the speaker of these poems as a woman who is at the same time in her mid-twenties and her mid-fifties, who is black and white and red, who is both trapped by and freed by motherhood." --Miller Williams

Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with great wisdom and compassion. Grounded but never earthbound, her poems speak honestly and eloquently about giving birth, nurturing life, and facing death; they inhabit the present, fully aware of their responsibilities to the past and the future. Waniek leaves us with the affecting strength and assurance of lasting things, as in the poem "Mama's Promise."

But the dangerous highway
curves through blue evenings
when I hold his yielding hand
and snip his minuscule nails
with my vicious-looking scissors.
I carry him around
like an egg in a spoon,
and I remember a porcelain fawn,
a best friend's trust,
my broken faith in myself.
It's not my grace that keeps me erect
as the sidewalk clatters downhill
under my rollerskate wheels.

Then I think of Mama,
her bountiful breasts.
When I was a child, I really swear,
Mama's kisses could heal.
I remember her promise,
and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep:
When you float to the bottom, child,
like a mote down a sunbeam,
you'll see me from a trillion miles away:
my eyes looking upon you,
my arms outstretched for you like night.

From "Mama's Promise" published in Mama's Promises by Marilyn Nelson.
Copyright (c) 1985 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved.

Biografía del autor:

Marilyn Nelson is currently a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she taught for more than twenty years, and Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. She received her doctorate at the University of Minnesota and has lived in Denmark and Germany.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Louisiana State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1985
• ISBN 10: 080711250X
• ISBN 13: 9780807112502
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 277