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In a series of exceptionally honest, revealing, emotionally charged poems, we are taken from the joyful though sometimes troubled childhood of a young German girl through difficult trials as an adult and finally on to a balanced life combining writing, family and friends.Joan Seliger Sidney has said this of the book: “In only twenty-two meticulously crafted poems, Gerda Walz-Michaels takes us on a journey through her life, from Hamburg, Germany to Storrs, Connecticut. Unafraid to ask herself hard questions (‘Why do I write down words / if I know they can’t say / what I want to say?’), she answers: ‘Naked in the nightmare of memories / I try to start afresh / like May flowers opening their buds...// I write my words /so that the truth might / reveal itself.’ And it does, as the poet revisits her childhood, tainted by Hitler and also by the death of her bedridden mother when she was nine. In ‘A Borrowed Night’ Walz-Michaels dreams her mother is back ‘after / fifty-five years of silence.’ The two come ‘together again, / completely natural, / giving love and being loved.’ In the end, Stone Walls is a love story, healing the past and making a ‘deep connection / with others, my surroundings, / or even myself.’ It’s a treasure.” And Myra Shapiro adds, “To be balanced, at peace in two worlds, requires connection, and Gerda Walz-Michaels’ poems insist on it. Stone Walls begins and ends with the ocean over which ‘There is a bridge.../ that nobody can destroy.’ In a poem about a beautiful confirmation gift from the poet’s German childhood, we come to her youngest daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. It is the future ‘tasted’ when she ‘steered courageously’ to Brittany years before with her son and daughter. Back and forth we are in the presence of waves rising not in threat but in welcome.”
Gerda Walz-Michaels was born in northern Germany and has traveled widely in Europe, the Near East, Canada and the U.S. She studied English and Pedagogy in Hamburg, became a teacher, married and became the mother of two children. In her midlife she moved to Storrs, Connecticut, where she married a second time and had a third child. She received her M.A. in Judaic Studies and Education and her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Connecticut. Gerda has taught and lectured at several colleges in Connecticut; and a number of years ago, she founded Gentle Actions, an Institute for Holistic Studies. In 2000 she wrote her first poem, “My Country,” which won first prize at the Windham Area Poetry Festival. In 2011 she published a collection of poetry, The Ocean Carries Me. Gerda lives with her husband in Storrs, Connecticut, and travels regularly to Germany, where her three children and one grandchild live in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. She also has stepdaughters living in Boston, Massachusetts and Madison, Wisconsin. Click here for sample poems. |
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-1-936482-91-7
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