Glenna Cook: Travelling Light Along Life's Journey

It’s not every day that I’m asked to read a new book of poems by a nonagenarian, and what a treat it is! These poems affirm that age may have its cost—breaking bones, losses echoing “like the somber gong of bell”—but as long as life continues there is dancing, bright blooms of another spring, art galleries, and the heart, stuffed full of gratitude and still “restless as a kite.”
   —Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree elegy for a farm

Art Calls Forth Memory

Eleven days after my son died
I flew to Madrid. At the Prado
Museum I stood for what seemed
an eternity, before Picasso’s mural,
Guernica, grieving for the screaming
woman holding her dead child.
One of my dearest treasures
is a lovely, large vase, made
of ash wood, that my husband
turned on a lathe he designed and built—
a piece of art in itself.

He spent many hours searching
for the right piece of wood. Golden
and glossy with smooth, fine grain.
He never considered his work good
enough for praise or sale.

What is art for if not to call forth memories?
The death of a son before his time.
A man who cannot see his own worth.
Sad memories are these, given to me
to heal in their afterlife. My husband sold
his marvelous, one-of-a-kind lathe
for scrap metal. No one wants to buy
a homemade lathe, he said.

Traveling Light is Glenna Cook’s fourth full-length collection of poems, all published by MoonPath Press. Glenna grew up in Olympia, WA, where, at age eighteen, she married her husband, Kenneth, and had three children, and she has nine grandchildren and eight great- grandchildren. She attended college after retiring from a twenty-five-year career with the telephone company. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound magna cum laude in 1994 at age fifty-eight, with a BA in English Literature. While at university, she won the Hearst Essay Prize for the Humanities and the Nixeon Civille Handy Poetry Prize. She is a Hedgebrook alumna and a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. Ever since she read that a well-known poet claimed that one could not write poetry after eighty, she has set about trying to prove him wrong. Now, in her nineties, she knows that this may be her last book, but she plans to keep writing poetry, until she can’t.

Visit Glenna’s page at MoonPathPress.com

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Kathleen O’Brien: Novena to Loss and Other Love Poems

In Novena to Loss and Other Love Poems, we see just how vastly, how deeply, the shadow of loss permeates every part of our lives. Kathleen O’Brien touches the truth of heartache with great courage and precision. These are clear-eyed poems about the muddle of grief, a stunning honoring of a life well lived and the gaping absence that remains.t.
   —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding

Widow as Refuge

In writing, a widow is considered “undesirable.”
The extra word hanging out on a line.

But there is refuge in being a widow.
The human kind.

You find someone who’s lost a special someone
at the airport, waiting to fly to a son or daughter.

Or in the grocery store, wandering
in the frozen-food section.

A ring too large for her finger
or a ring dangling on her necklace.

Your eyes linger on the ring and hers on yours
and you weep together.

Without one word spoken, you know about the shirt
she sleeps with, and she, about yours.

At the age of seven, Kathleen O’Brien received a tiny memo pad intended to contain her little poems about fairies. And from time to time she did write poetry, mostly unseen by others. Kathleen has had a long career in technical writing. During the quiet of COVID she returned to her first loves, poetry and short fiction. She is more widely known for publishing books, articles, and papers on the benefits of sustainable building, and tending to the health of our planet and the people trying to make a life on it. She is mostly retired, living in Bainbridge Island, Washington. She looks forward to sharing her experience through poetry with others who are experiencing grief in any form..

Visit Kathleen's page at MoonPathPress.com

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