Stones Ripe for Sowing

by Libby Bernardin

Overview

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining—her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sowing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to “forage in hard and doubtful places.” —John Lane

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941209851
Publisher:	Press 53
Publication date:	10/18/2018
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

Table of Contents

A Letter to Susan, in Ireland

I

Black-Eyed Susan

Meteor Shower

If I could speak to the god of our childhood

I do this for you,

Wisteria

Stasis

Solstice

Consider the Cardinal

And the Great White Pelicans

She Who Listens to Hummingbirds

Where We Leave Our Name

Naming in the Garden at the Headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates

Perseus’ Dream

Frog

Words

The Narrow Shore

Je Ne Sais Quoi

Fog

Down to the Salt Meadow and Heaving Sea

In the Blue Ridge Mountains

II

Absence Gathers

After your funeral

The Transient Nature of Things

As if I Blinked

Sign Language

We find ourselves

Transubstantiation

Like Wings

Violets

Snow in the Low Country

Bear

Crows at My Feeder

Between the Rivers

On Waking with Anxiety

Grief Released

III

Nothing to it,

And when the forest of your bearable life appears

Geography

Easing Westward

From East Coast to West

Wayfarers at Pearson’s Falls

Transmigration

Grief Works Its Way

Tapestry

Sister

Among Stones

While Drinking Coffee & Eating Apricot Preserves

What I Don’t Begrudge

A Shim in Quaking Water

Metamorphosis

Morning Glory

Editorial Reviews

Libby Bernardin has crafted a haunting collection from a life well lived and carefully examined. These stunning poems question and affirm while eschewing answers. They invite us to “step into doubt, that hard stone, / seed of spring, of water, of fire.” Firmly grounded in the natural world, Bernardin trains her gaze deep into our very nature and existence, addressing loss and grief, aging, wonder and joy, all the contradictions of our human existence, with language that is at once lyrical and precise. These poems celebrate the every day and the sacred. This is a collection that invites you to become “a new person emerging from this hard case, / a chrysalis with one wing out, trembling.” —Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining—her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sowing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to “forage in hard and doubtful places.” —John Lane, author of Anthropocene Blues

The title perfectly captures Bernardin’s unerring use of metaphor and metaphysical, self-deprecating wit, as does, “Nothing to it,/forgetting yesterday:/I blow it like kisses to past phantoms.” She would never claim to grow flowers from the stones of loss, grief, or vagaries of aging, but she does. Her luscious, painterly poems find solace in nature; joy and beauty even in grief; simultaneously youthful and wise, and brimming with life; compassionate and unfailingly generous, “scattering seeds/like grain cast/among the famished,” sharing “the god-like immensity of ordinary things.” —April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

From the Publisher