As the title of Polly Brody’s third book suggests, the poet portrays both the darkness of life and its heart-stirring beauty. Dire death and a variety of other cruelties are graphically described in Stirring Shadows, but equally vivid are the possibilities of love, redemption, mercy, and resurrection. In the first section of the book, the voracious raptor Life takes many forms, from red-toothed nature to insane and drunken parents, the libidinous lord of a manor, a tyrannical husband, a rapacious government... In the book’s second section, the godly grandeur of the natural world is suggested in lines like these: “Moonlight through the skin/ of a bat’s stretched wing...” Brody shows that catastrophe can be the mother of beauty, as when the “Little Ice Age” in Europe begot the tight-ringed wood that begot the “sweetest voice” of the Stradivarius violin. The third section of Stirring Shadows shows that Death shall have no dominion. In one poem, the poet’s elderly mother, though in the last stages of life, retains her passion for wild things: she calls her daughter to describe a doe that came to her “upon its dainty, pronged hooves” and stretched its neck to eat the carefully quartered apples she held out. The mother becomes the doe herself when on her death bed she savors the slice of an apple proffered by her daughter: “Crescent by sweet crescent,/ her mouth receives this balm.” And indeed, it is balm that the Polly Brody offers us in this stirring collection which ends with three remarkable poems. In the first two, a granddaughter becomes both a solace—when she “slide[s] into being/ as if from ready Milkweed pod”—and then a resurrection of sorts. The poet likens her aging self to a dead tree’s branches that will become part of an ongoing younger tree which “will clasp firm those dead arms/ in living heartwood.” Stirring Shadows ends with a memorable catharsis when the zoologist poet compares herself to a bee (Apis mellifera) that in its dying finds “a golden resting place” ensconced in “the lemon heart of a Chrysanthemum.”
About this remarkable book, Susan Deborah King, the author of One-Breasted Woman, has commented as follows: “In Stirring Shadows, Polly Brody looks with an unflinching eye upon many kinds of darkness: evil, illness, loss, betrayal, separation, death and, in language that is sure, searing, lyrical, and spare, cracks the safe of these hard realities for the gold cached within them. While possessing a singular affinity with the natural world and a visionary consciousness, Brody’s voice is marked by keen observation, uncommon compassion, astringent insight and peerless transformative power. These poems, by zeroing in and plumbing depths, soar.” Polly Brody received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Mount Holyoke College, and after returning to school in mid-life, earned a Masters Degree in Biology from Southern Connecticut State University. A resident of Southbury, Connecticut, she has traveled extensively in Europe, East Africa, Australia and South America. As a biologist and experienced field ornithologist, she lectures on animal behavior and has created seminars on that subject. She has been an active advocate for the environment, and while chairing the Newtown Conservation Commission, she helped preserve 790 acres of prime woodland. Polly Brody is the author of three earlier collections: Other Nations, The Burning Bush, and At the Flower’s Lip. She has been published in many literary journals and in 1998 was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings competition. Her poems have twice received the Winchell Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society, and she placed first in the 2005 Connecticut River Review Contest. In 2006 Polly was awarded third place in the national competition sponsored by Friends of Acadia, judged by Wesley McNair. She has been a presenting poet in the New England Foundation for the Humanities series, “After Frost: Poetry in New England,” and has read widely throughout Connecticut and New York. To view Polly Brody’s other Antrim House books, click onThe
Burning Bush and At the Flower’s Lip.
For a televised appearance on SCTV, cllick here. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-0-9823970-3-9
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HAWK Arrived has fastened itself waits above, A presence made known my patio, bare of sparrows, Raptor hush— |
BEYOND KUWAIT CITY Wreckage juts This book survived A tank, ripped open, leans |
GOLDEN LILY Six years old, Mother and grandmother come They wind cloth Relentless pressure will deform the arch: Years bound, |
TREE FROG No longer than |
Sleek hulks glide, dark |
THE SWEETEST VOICE Each year’s growth ring, cramped and narrow, |
BENEDICTION I walk once more with you, mother,
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ENVOY She is withering. I duck my head to kiss Today she telephones, to tell me
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ATTENDING MY GRANDCHILD’S BIRTH Sleeping Beauty came into the world Desires unfurl toward you Innocent of dream-spells,
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Apis
mellifera This chilled November morning,
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