Product Description
by D. Walsh Gilbert (Author)
With her lush exploration of the natural world, D. Walsh Gilbert magnifies small moments and wee creatures into epiphanies of all kinds in Bleat & Prattle. No creature is too small to be the hero of a story, or a myth. Whether as metaphor or anthropomorphic investigation, she inhabits the animals and flowers she describes, as in "I long to be a wasp, to communicate by stinger," in the poem "Resolution." Like the great Irish poets Patrick Kavanagh and Eamon Grennan, for Walsh (a dual citizen) the texture of sound in a poem is all-important. In "The Little Hills of Monaghan," we find the lines, "This, the same scurf smell/ scuffed from the drumlins/ of Kavanagh's/ Inniskeen Road/ as he walked." Her Irish poems will transport any reader right to the old country. One of my favorite poems in this collection is "The Time of Balance," a study of a northern cardinal during a thunderstorm. Clinging to a holly bough, the cardinal exhibits "the stiff refusal of a small thing/ who tastes winter's vaulted wind on his beak// and still opens his mouth. He swallows/ the tempest." This fine collection takes you by the hand and leads you directly into the wonders of the living world. -Steve Straight author of Affirmation winner of the William Meredith Award in Poetry
