
—Claudia Emerson (author of Late Wife, winner of the Pulitzer for Poetry in 2006)
Kathleen Driskell’s audacious and complex Seed Across Snow
is a stunning book. Reading Driskell’s poems is like looking into the
luminous wonder of a shell or a feather, so straightforwardly
identifiable yet so mysterious in its formation. She writes of the
terrifying danger of the ordinary, loved ones in daily situations that
could threaten their existence—or change the world. Driskell makes a
poetry of emergencies alternating with a deep appreciation of those
moments in life when all is well. With humor, sass, a luxuriance of
line and a sense of our interior worlds so sure that she can follow a
thread of feeling to a knot of thought and back through the thought to
feeling again, Kathleen Driskell gives us important poetry, brilliant
and necessary.
—Molly Peacock (The Second Blush, Norton 2008)
Why I Mother You the Way I Do
by Kathleen DriskellThat afternoon, I have to admit, there were no thoughts
of you. I was in high school - making my way past
the buses to a waiting car - a boy who would not be
your father - when the line of traffic stopped. The girls,
classmates, sisters, had darted between buses
and into the highway, trying to cross the field to their home.
They both lay twisted in the road. My science teacher,
Mr. Desaro, took off his suit coat and laid it over Susan's
face. He was crying because he only had one coat.
By the time they let us pass, Eve had been covered with a white
sheet. The ambulances had come. Red lights flashed, but
their mother was still pushing her silver cart
through the grocery. The sheriff was walking up behind
her. As she reached for a gallon of milk, he moved
to touch her arm.
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