Description
Book SynopsisOffer a deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of Fleda Brown's life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses.
Trade Review"This is the kind of light-filled book we use to see the world more clearly and make our way forward—and we do it with a poem in each hand, as Kooser recommends."—Julie Larios,
Numero Cinq"The complexities and complications of the poet who is among and yet stands back, and who understands the limits of life yet yearns and hungers for everything life has within it, are offered in
The Woods Are On Fire, and the pleasures and challenges of great poetry can both be found in this necessary book by Fleda Brown."—Adrian Koesters,
Split Rock Review“Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present.”—
World Literature TodayTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction by Ted Kooser
Backfires
I. from Fishing with Blood (1988)
Garden
To Mark, My Retarded Brother, Who Lived 20 Years and Learned to Speak 300 Words
Arch
For Grandmother Beth
A Plain Philosophical Choice
Out Back
Canoe
Whaler
Catching Turtles
Fishing with Blood
Apalachee Bay
The Scholar’s Cat
Saving a Life
He Says How It Was
Emily Dickinson’s Love
Love, for Instance
from “O’Keeffe”
She Learns to Walk
She Learns to Talk
A New Yorker Visits Her Exhibition
She Marries the Photographer
An Expert Explains Her Work
II. from Do Not Peel the Birches (1993)
Elvis at the End of History
Do Not Peel the Birches
A Long and Happy Life
Learning to Dance
After the Rain
Loon Cries
Night Swimming
My Father Takes My Retarded Brother Sailing
If I Were a Swan
Dock
A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
Mississippi River, near Cape Girardeau, MO
Mother of the Bride Dress
St. Paul’s and St. George’s Church, Edinburgh
Farthest North Southern Town
Burdett Palmer’s Foot
Kitty Hawk
Anhinga
Bombay Hook
III. from Breathing In, Breathing Out (2002)
Fourth of July Parade, Albion, WA
Buying the King-Sized Bed
Cosmic Pitching
Somewhere
Dogs
Highway 5
The Poet Laureate Addresses the Delaware Legislature Opening Its First Session after September 11
Rumors of Changes Circulate on Penguins
Cow Falling
Spring
Leaving Lewisburg
Mary Rose Quotes James Joyce on the Cliffs at Bray
Sunday Morning
Chicken Bone
Hyperspace
Language
Chat
For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997
Your Body
I Write My Mother a Poem
Einstein on Mercer Street
IV. from The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (2004)
Tillywilly Fog
I Escape with My Mother in the DeSoto
Elvis Aron and Jesse Garon
Memphis Discovers Elvis
Elvis Goes to the Army
Shaking Hands with Nixon
Sputnik, 1957
Elvis Sings Gospel
Industrial Teflon Comes into Use for Kitchen Pots and Pans
Bus Stop
The Night before Her Third Marriage, She Watches a Rerun of Elvis’s Comeback Performance
Elvis Acts as His Own Pallbearer
Mrs. Louise Welling Spots Elvis at Harding’s Market
I Visit the Twenty-Four Hour Coin-Op Church of Elvis
Elvis Reads “The Wild Swans at Coole”
from “Graceland”
Elvis’s Bedroom
Lisa Marie’s Favorite Chair
The Mirrored Stairwell
The Meditation Garden
V. from Reunion (2007)
If Names Started Coming Loose
Biology Lesson
What It Was Like
Fayetteville Junior High
Knot Tying Lessons: The Slipknot
Makeup Regimen
Mouse
Trillium
Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge
Light
Ode to the Buffman Brothers
Wild Lily of the Valley
No Heron
Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot
Knife
Bladder Campion
The Death of Cleone
Poem for Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary
Through Security
Lady’s Slipper
VI. from Loon Cry: Selected and New Michigan Poems (2010)
Scavengers
Crouching
Hawsers
Wild Turkeys
Deer
Northern Pike
Chicory
VII. from No Need of Sympathy (2013)
Year of the Tent Caterpillars
For, Or, Nor
Sugar, Sugar
The Purpose of Poetry
The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower
My Father and Hemingway Go Fishing
Roofers
Hare’s Breath
God, God
Dancing at Your Wedding
Child Labor
Here, in Silence, Are Eight More
Short History of Music
Big Bang
Worms
Felled Tree
Translation
Building a Cathedral
Talk Radio
Fourteen Lines
VIII. New Poems
The Swan Flies Straight at Me
Elegance
Unfurl
The Undoing
News
On a Day That Bombs
Feeding the Maggots
Bees
Taxol
Cancer Support Group with Painting by Monet
Snoring
Lesson
Mute Swan
Tulips
The Elk Farm
Edward Hopper’s Automat
Silence
What Happens
Fawn
Wheel
The War
Pike
Muskrat
Tiny Fish
Every Day I Touch Things
View from Space
The Gospel Truth
Speed
Blueweed
Refrigerator
Poem for Record Players
The Sex Life of Anacondas
The Bar Mitzvah
Mummy Exhibit
Caterpillars
Getting Free
July 20, 1944
Wild
Asian Carp
Grateful
Protection
Cedar Waxwing
The Poem I Was Going to Write
Reading the Smithsonian Magazine
Surrounded by People
I Say Your Name
Five Moons
Mushrooms
