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Presenting
a new chapbook of poetry by
Linda Sonia Miller
Something Worth
Diving For
published by Finishing Line Press
sample
3 poems |
photo by Giancarlo Traverso |
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Order your copy today.
Order copies now for yourself and those on your gift
list from the publisher.
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If you plan to give copies as
gifts,
the author will be happy to provide you with
gift cards inscribed to those receiving the
book. Place your order with
Finishing Line Press.
Then email your name
and address with the names of book recipients to
Linda Sonia Miller
(LSoniaM@netscape.net)
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About the
poetry
"In
Something Worth Diving
For
Linda Sonia Miller pulls a pickerel from a cold lake
and finds a heart, sees children who “hang like damp
clothes/from sofa arms” and discovers that one of
the “small gifts” from the world that continually
astonishes her is poetry itself.
Her love poems to
infancy, childhood, and maturity expand with this
freedom and surprise. I welcome the debut of this
lively metaphorist who meditates on time in such
deft quick lines."
Molly Peacock
(author of The Paper
Garden, and six books of poetry, including The Second Blush and
Cornucopia: New &
Selected Poems )
Click to
read 3 selections from the book.
About the poet
Linda Sonia
Miller has enjoyed a lifelong relationship
with poetry. It permeates the works in this
collection, as evidenced below in
“Poetry.”
To develop her skills for writing her own poetry,
Linda studied with such eminent poets as Grace
Schulman, Molly Peacock, Linda Pastan and Carolyn
Forche.
The love of reading and writing
poetry also strongly influenced her
professional life, a rewarding career as a teacher
of literature and creative writing. Her students
range from kindergarten to college to senior
citizens and incarcerated youth. As a teacher of
teachers, she has presented on effective approaches
to student writing at state and national conferences
and has served as a Connecticut Writing Project
Consultant and an N.E.H. Fellow and Advisor. While
Writing Coordinator K-12 of the Pelham Public
Schools in Westchester County, NY, she authored the
district's Writing Curriculum. She has led writing
workshops in NY and CT and has been instrumental in
the development of two Festivals of Writers and
numerous other literary events in her current
hometown, Rensselaerville, NY.
Her work has appeared in such journals
as: Aries, South Boston Literary Review, and
The New York Times.
Click
to read 3 selections from the book.
"Bougainvillea"
"Poetry"
"Spring Cleaning..."
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Cover design
Peter McCaffrey
mascotstudio.com |
The Publisher
Finishing Line Press |
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Selections
from Something Worth Diving For |
Bougainvillea
I learned
nothing of flowers in the city blocks
where I spent hours growing, but read
of heather sweeping the moors and tulips
lining Amsterdam’s streets, and
edelweiss
painting the Alpine slopes
with color,
but I loved most the idea
of bougainvillea—
its vowel-rich,
Creole-sounding name, drawling,
lazy
like southern nights in Civil War
romances.
I saw in bougainvillea
smooth lavenders
and pinks, hot reds
and satin-sheet whites,
smelled a
heavy sweetness, sultry and moist,
dreamt tropical nights, palm-sheltered
islands
and Gauguin watching his
women wrapped
in Tahitian cloth,
whispering together
on the mission
porch, weaving tight braids
into long
black hair, tucking bougainvillea
behind their ears.
(return to top)
Poetry
In my first
remembered home, books spilled
from
bookcases, and you read aloud to us
And the
highwayman came riding, riding
up to
the old inn door.
Windows opened
without screens onto city streets
and
Louie-the-Cat leaped from sill to sill
two stories
high, above the concrete alley
where
the super’s daughter sat, sun-drying her
hair
Bess, the landlord’s daughter, the
landlord’s
black-eyed daughter.
There was Casey
too, last man at bat,
Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass, and King Lear’s
wails of
betrayal, your eyes glistening
with
his pain, your stormy self lost in
poetry.
In
five plain rooms with old tweed chairs
on hot city summer days
my sister and I
would hang like damp clothes
from
sofa-arms, our brothers limp on the
floor
and
listen to your booming voice,
the
cadence of verses, syllables crashing
like waves
on the shore
of our small parched
planet.
(return to top)
Spring Cleaning: Northeast Kingdom,
Vt. 1978
When the
season’s final hours tease us into
spring
and temperatures rise melting
blackened stacks of snow,
warming us
as if winter were but a dream –
when loggers’ wives emerge from
tar-shingled homes
with armloads of
dishes, pots and clothes, sofas, tables,
toys,
like offerings to appease the
north-wind gods, and place them
upon shrines of rugs atop white-green
lawns, then return
to emptied homes,
wash walls and floors with suds-swollen
ferocity.
When that reprieve arrives
with sun-streaked days, I listen
from my glassed in porch to my
neighbors’ Quebecois chatter,
mysterious to me, newcomer, new mother,
watching
this sudden bustle and
commotion, the once barren slope now
a collage of color, sunlight leaping
from pans to polished tabletops,
and
forget my world of books and toddlers,
hours of isolation,
months of dark
and shortened days.
I emerge,
jealous of such joyful purpose, inhale
the soapy,
sun-warmed air, feel the
sodden ground beneath my feet,
something inside me cleansed.
(return to top)
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