Exploring this Terrain: Poems

by Margaret B. Ingraham

Overview

Margaret B. Ingraham’s collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to “taste and see” – and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives.

“What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the ‘secret places of my brokenness.’  It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith.” —Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640603769
Publisher:	Paraclete Press
Publication date:	04/01/2020
Series:	Paraclete Poetry , #1
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Margaret B. Ingraham, a poet and photographer, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and “grew up” exploring the woods behind her childhood home. She is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry, and of This Holy Alphabet (Paraclete Press), lyric poems adapted from her own translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119. Ingraham is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, a Sam Ragan Prize and numerous residential Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has twice collaborated with composer Gary Davison, most notably to create “Shadow Tides,“ a choral symphony commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and performed on that date in Washington, DC. Ingraham lives in Alexandria, VA.

Table of Contents

I In Mountains' Shade

Proverbs 13

Transfiguration 15

Evensong 16

The Thrush of Morning 17

Postcard from the Blue Ridge 18

Beholding Nehemiah 19

Picture Postcard from VA - Winter Landscape 20

Ordinary Time 22

Overlooking Shenandoah 22

At the Memorial 23

II All the Water Touches

Observances 27

Moving from Deep 29

Tidewater 30

Resemblance 32

Echo Song 34

Empty Chamber 35

Ode for a Crossing Fox 36

Preservation 38

III This Small Plot

Great Blue in the Cemetery 43

Crossing 45

Clearing 46

Thanksgiving Morning 47

Remembering Papa 48

Morning Business 50

Unraveling the Riddle of our Sphinx 52

After the Diagnosis 54

To Paint the Purple Finch 55

IV The Company of Women

Certainty 59

Of Moment 61

Even 62

Vanished Light 63

The Nellie Mae Fragments

i Perennial 64

ii Thaw 65

Two Women 66

Dark Intersection 67

The Photographer's Woman 68

Poet to Painter 70

A Song of Ascent 71

As A Matter of Fact 72

Mother of Moses 75

Proper Words for Birds 76

V And of Men

Unforeseen 81

Paternal Instinct 82

What History Has to Say 83

Finding the Fisherman 84

Lost in the Wilderness 86

Family Album 88

Note from the Good Land 89

Meredith's Law 90

Mending 92

A Neighbor in the Aftermath 93

Last Dance 96

VI The Wisdom of Creatures

Drake 99

Fallow Field 100

Unseen 101

Pastoral 102

An Offering 103

Snail's Pace 104

White Noise 105

Lowing 106

Witness 107

VII What Abides

Certain Light 111

Come Now 113

Keeping Silence 114

Contemplating Pluto 115

Gradual Song 116

Suffrages 117

What the Mountain Knows 118

Epitaph 120

Divinum Mysterium 121

Acknowledgments 122

About the Author 123

Editorial Reviews

If attention is a kind of love, then Margaret B. Ingraham loves the Shenandoah landscape—the ‘waters/clucking softly on the rocks’ and the ‘pillar of cloud’ above. ‘It is all about light,’ she writes, and we are lucky indeed to bask in her mind’s light in these lush, meditative poems.” —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
 
“There is something of Elizabeth Bishop in this new collection by Margaret B. Ingraham. Her remarkable eye and close consideration of landscape reveal a deeper mystery beneath it all. She never flinches. In her poem “Ordinary Time,” she writes, ‘In this light I question how to hold/blessings such as these in trembling/hands […]’ These poems are full of such blessings—each complicated in its own delightful way. Exploring this Terrain possesses a rare lived wisdom and we would do well to listen.” —Michael Shewmaker, author of Penumbra.
 
“Margaret Ingraham's poetry is a wake up call... as if to say, ‘Wake up to what is around you!’ She sees so clearly that her poems make me aware of my own cloudy vision and stir a yearning to see with a poet's eye.” —Hattie Kauffman, author of Falling into Place.
 
“Margaret B. Ingraham knows that sometimes the world gives us no options; we chose what we must. In seeing and naming this ‘inexorable slide’ she admits grace and shapes beauty, silently evoking the Isaiah poet.  When Ingraham asks such questions as, ‘was it the wind that taught the wolf/ to howl or did the wolf give voice to the wind/and could you hear it then…?’ the poetry of Job, too, seems to alight on the page. Ingraham’s formal lyricism, love of the pastoral, and overheard conversations stand in the revered tradition of Robert Frost. She is a poet who knows ‘there…is no synonym for light’ yet still she writes, understanding that contemporary poets are still makers and holding to the abiding truth that wisdom might just be found in seeking to name and praise the light." —Dana Littlepage Smith, author of Women Clothed With the Sun

“Through its rhymes, meter, and (lightly placed) biblical framework, Exploring this Terrain means to comfort. Braiding earnest religious longing into the memories and observations of an entirely earthly terrain, Ingraham’s poems hold the lushness and ease of the rural South. But the light they so often praise has a vaster scope, and “is all about… / the way it seeks a silhouette,/ the way it can transform / the rough and round / to smooth and plain.” This book’s impulse is, above all, a generous one.”  —Taije Silverman, author of Houses Are Fields
 
 

From the Publisher