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“In A Tilted World, Carol Fine offers us a chronicle of loss, deeply moving in its honesty and courage.” So writes the poet Edwina Trentham, who goes on to say, “Beginning with ‘the chill of. . . childhood,’ where she never dared to assume her family loved her, she vividly shows how this early wound contributed to a sense of being ‘tilted / out of place’ in a world that offers and then too swiftly takes back love. She writes of a husband who dies five years after leaving ‘the bleakness of our life’ and thus allows her no right to grieve, even as she mourns ‘the aloneness / greater even than marriage’s, / the absence of shared memories.’ Not surprisingly, Fine’s searing exploration of loss expands to more devastating and universal losses, as she describes relatives writing to beg for refuge from the Holocaust. And this understanding of a shared oppression is quietly explored later as she describes a sign on a tourist cabin near her summer camp, which advertised ‘No Jews.’ Yet throughout the book, despite the reality that she and anxiety have always been ‘inseparable as school girls,’ the poet continually delights in the sensory experiences of life. And although sometimes she wonders if she is ‘dreaming / a lusciousness that never was,’ the past is painted with ‘winey plums, rosy peaches / against navy glaze’ and ‘the clear, hot, ruby liquor’ of borscht, while more recent memories, including seventeen warm and loving Grace Notes, reveal a rich and loving connection with her four grandchildren. The poet thinks ruefully, ‘I must have done better than I thought’ as she watches her daughter ‘mothering her baby’ and laughing ‘as his drooly hands flail at her face,’ and ends the Grace Notes with a grandson insisting after a dinner at Friendly’s that they must take their grandmother home, because she will be lonely if she has to go by herself. The experience of such tenderness leads naturally to poems of quiet joy and acceptance. In the end, this sense of a ‘soul restored’ remains, confirmed through the description of an all-day reading of the names of ‘four thousand of the six million,’ a shared experience that leaves the congregation ‘strangers no more.’
Carol Gabrielson Fine is a graduate of Vassar College, Clark University, and Wesleyan University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, under whose auspices she earned a second Masters degree forty years after her first. Had she believed in the advice of her freshman year English professor at Vassar, Amy Louise Reed, she might have written poetry sooner. Instead, she became a nursery school teacher, school psychologist, and research psychologist working with deaf and hard-of-hearing children. At Wesleyan she began writing poetry in the classes of Edwina Trentham and Charlotte Currier, and shortly thereafter was the invited reader in the Prosser Poetry Series at Prosser Library in Bloomfield, CT. A sometime art student, she painted in her younger days and has always been a devotee of chamber music, opera, and theater. In addition to membership in several poetry groups, she has been a member of the Social Justice Committee of Congregation Beth Israel, coordinating work at soup kitchens and knitting hundreds of winter caps for Hartford children in the after-school program at Charter Oak Cultural Center. As a member of the West Hartford Interfaith Housing Coalition, she worked to procure affordable housing; and as a founding member of Adventures Together, she seeks to foster interfaith understanding through book discussions involving members of Congregation Beth Israel and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Carol Fine is the mother of two children, the grandmother of four, an aunt and great aunt many times over. She lives at Seabury in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Click here for sample poems. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-1-936482-88-7
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