WALDEN – “Hard Feelings,” Elizabeth McCarthy’s second poetry collection, from Finishing Line Press, will be available for shipment in March of 2024.
McCarthy’s poetry is filled with close observations of birds and other wildlife found in the Vermont countryside. Through metaphor and simile, form and imagination, the poet transforms these observations into the language of poetry.
In the title poem, the last wild apples of the season are likened to grudges that linger and ferment, becoming “sour little/hearts that/rot in place.”
In “Scuttled Memories,” an extended maritime metaphor evokes the sense of time passing when we leave our grief and regrets “stuck in the wooden hull/of memory.”
Yet these are ultimately celebratory poems, full of the joy of discovery, like the old milkweed seeds that “burst open/the pod door — escaping/to whorl and dance/in the autumn sun.”
In Elizabeth McCarthy’s new collection, poetry enters a world of sandhill cranes, field crickets, spring peepers, odd cats, and cleansing rain. McCarthy speaks of her preferred world, “where understanding / is the sunrise.”
Reverently hanging items of laundry in the summer sun, McCarthy writes about, “pinning them in silent prayer,” and we experience the day through her appreciative eyes. These are poems that offer solace, even when processing grief. Above all else, these are poems of hope, “for those who / believe in destiny / delivered in the night / of each new month.”
The book may be pre-ordered from Finishing Line Press.
