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After All is the chronicle of a woman’s ordinary life. Girls wonder what it is their mothers do all day, only to learn the truth when they become mothers themselves. Siblings torment each other. Lovers enchant and disappoint. The dead never quite leave. Along the way there is sex and grief, anger and tenderness, as Daneman explores what it means, after all, to have been a daughter, a wife, a mother. The poems are like snapshots, capturing moments otherwise lost. After All is about growing up and growing old, getting along with family and getting by alone.
You can purchase the book at full price through the publisher or Bookshop.org, but the best way is to email me. I will send you a signed copy, shipping included for a special price of $15, payable by Venmo, PayPal or check. Reviews "In this first full-length collection of poems, Daneman pulls us into the all that is living and dying. The poems are catalogs and songs, dreams and elegies—with a voice of startling clarity about relationships—how we long for them, live in and through them, even when they don’t fully satisfy. “My mother never once slapped me / though I could feel as if her grief were inside me, / how much she wanted to / how far she could see every time she looked into my eyes.” The poet’s keen perceptions as reflected in the speaker’s emotional landscape resonate throughout." --Gail Goepfert, Rhinopoetry.org (Full review. ) "Why should you buy another book of poetry? Why this one? Because, for one thing, these poems were written by someone you’d probably like to know--someone who has lived a conscious life, from the cruelties of childhood through the middle passage of grief to the later times when it all comes together in the assurance of love made real." --B.K. Loots "Pat Daneman is one of my favorite poets, probably not well known outside a devoted circle of family and Kansas City friends (I am one of these), in part because she publishes her first book this year. Buy it, especially if you are a person over 50 or a person who has lost a family member or if you are a woman. That should cover just about everyone. Her writing concerns, often but not always, her loss of a spouse. This is not the only theme, but it makes the book essential reading." —Denise Low (deniselow.blogspot.com) |
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To buy directly from me for $15 and free shipping, email me at pat dot daneman4 at gmail dot com. Use button to buy from Bookshop.org.
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Where the World Begins is dedicated to "my mother and her family, who gave me the gift of making things up."
As children, my cousins and I heard a lot of stories--about ghosts, bar fights, tornadoes--that left us with vivid impressions of our grandparents' and parents' lives as cotton sharecroppers in northeast Louisiana during the Depression. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles all loved to talk about how bad they had it and how much fun they had. Who knows what was true and what was a tiny bit embroidered. I didn't meet several of my cousins until a few years ago. When I did, it was at a first-ever family reunion, where we gathered in the kitchen of Aunt Hazel's haunted house and discovered we all knew the same stories.
The twenty poems in Where the World Begins are an attempt to capture their memories, their mischief and their joy.
Reviews
These poems do not simply tell the most important stories--they sing those stories. . . . The songs are grief-stricken, as many of the old songs are, but they know how to recognize love in the rough touch of a mother's hands tugging a comb through the knots. They know what belonging is, they can hear that 'Every stone says he has to stay here,' where the 'he' in the poem is all of us and the 'here' is the home we are all searching for." --Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx, Even Now and Tracing the Lines
These evocative poems cut to the bone of the human condition. They are stories about people and the ghosts who won't let them forget ... people who "remember the recipes, the back way to the graveyard." There are tender touches and callused hands. "Where the World Begins" is a collection of poems about place, too. Rural, fertile, wild, hard places ... places you want to cling to and flee from, where "distance is frozen like a river ribbed with ice, waves tricked by the wind into leaping early." The characters and places in this work are more than familiar; these are my people, my land. And I know them better now. --Gary Marx, author of A River through Illinois
As children, my cousins and I heard a lot of stories--about ghosts, bar fights, tornadoes--that left us with vivid impressions of our grandparents' and parents' lives as cotton sharecroppers in northeast Louisiana during the Depression. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles all loved to talk about how bad they had it and how much fun they had. Who knows what was true and what was a tiny bit embroidered. I didn't meet several of my cousins until a few years ago. When I did, it was at a first-ever family reunion, where we gathered in the kitchen of Aunt Hazel's haunted house and discovered we all knew the same stories.
The twenty poems in Where the World Begins are an attempt to capture their memories, their mischief and their joy.
Reviews
These poems do not simply tell the most important stories--they sing those stories. . . . The songs are grief-stricken, as many of the old songs are, but they know how to recognize love in the rough touch of a mother's hands tugging a comb through the knots. They know what belonging is, they can hear that 'Every stone says he has to stay here,' where the 'he' in the poem is all of us and the 'here' is the home we are all searching for." --Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx, Even Now and Tracing the Lines
These evocative poems cut to the bone of the human condition. They are stories about people and the ghosts who won't let them forget ... people who "remember the recipes, the back way to the graveyard." There are tender touches and callused hands. "Where the World Begins" is a collection of poems about place, too. Rural, fertile, wild, hard places ... places you want to cling to and flee from, where "distance is frozen like a river ribbed with ice, waves tricked by the wind into leaping early." The characters and places in this work are more than familiar; these are my people, my land. And I know them better now. --Gary Marx, author of A River through Illinois
Find Me
Full-length collection, seeking a publisher
My third Book, Find Me, has been making the rounds for a couple of years. The manuscript has progressed to the finals in two (of many) contests I have entered, but nothing more. It will probably take a few revisions, but I like the book--the poems and the idea--and I've had a lot of great help and good advice, so I'm not giving up yet. The poems are about love in all its gory glory. Here are the first three--
We Humans
We humans, we lose each other.
Follow complicated routes,
badly lit—red and yellow lines,
blue lines, thick and thin, sudden turns,
ramps running out. We surrender
to distance, nightfall, sunny afternoons,
press send with guilty fingers,
buy plants that need more care
than newborns and watch leaves drop.
We visit for the holidays and stay too long.
We creep away before the party’s over,
paint our skin with sin and indignation,
believe our edges smooth,
though we are jagged as rockslides,
disruptive as hurricanes, with our whispers
and hesitant requests. Our bodies ache,
our brains cannot decide. Not one of us knows
how to read the map, let alone fold it
back down to a neat flat square.
The touch of one fingertip would be enough--
pinprick of warmth along a wrist, tickle
in the soul. We mumble, shuffle, sleep drunk
in strange rooms. We cook too much food,
give money to strangers. Our eyes burn
straining into the map. We think hurting
is love and loving is hurt, that caring for you
feels too much like caring for me.
We are manic and thoughtless, like tadpoles
or bats—why can’t we have wings?
We dream of wings, then remember
the sun and we fall.
A Birthday
Picture a man in a shower. Don’t worry--
by the end you will know more about him
than his bare skin. For example, what kind of work
he does. How his wife takes her coffee.
He is not a tall man, but he is strong.
He lifts his head, lets the falling water beat his face.
His hair is turning gray, just a little, at the temples.
When he leaves for work, his wife is often asleep.
As he is the dog of their marriage, she is the cat--
she likes warm quilts and sleeping in. She likes
strong coffee, which she brews in a French press
every morning and drinks with an inch of cream.
All day he works outside, up and down a ladder,
hammering, hauling shingles, telling men
what to do, while his wife turns the pages
of magazines, walks down the hall to the closed door
at the end. You want to look inside, don't you?
There’s nothing interesting to see. Nobody’s ever slept here,
child or guest. These could be the people on your street
that no one knows. The guy who drives the truck.
The slightly heavy woman who wears her slippers
to the mailbox. You smile; she smiles back.
The old lady whose house is getting a new roof
is drinking. She tilts through the front door
to yell about the noise. But back to the beginning--
the shower. Plenty of hot water. Lavender soap.
Were you thinking it was morning? No.
This man’s day is ending. His birthday.
I should have made a cake for you, his wife says, pleased
with the flowery scent of his neck. He doesn’t care
about cake. He's tired. He just wants to sit
for a minute, quietly considering the small gift
of her hand approaching his knee.
Responsibility for a Heart
When anyone loves you,
their heart turns to glass,
see-through and delicate,
ready to tremble like bells,
sending notes through their blood,
so when they close their eyes,
they hear music. It is heavy,
the responsibility for a heart
not your own. You will never see it,
except in their eyes, a tide
rising and falling, a light dimming
and glowing. You will never
touch it, except on their lips,
a taste made up of time
and pain and everything
they will never tell you.
Full-length collection, seeking a publisher
My third Book, Find Me, has been making the rounds for a couple of years. The manuscript has progressed to the finals in two (of many) contests I have entered, but nothing more. It will probably take a few revisions, but I like the book--the poems and the idea--and I've had a lot of great help and good advice, so I'm not giving up yet. The poems are about love in all its gory glory. Here are the first three--
We Humans
We humans, we lose each other.
Follow complicated routes,
badly lit—red and yellow lines,
blue lines, thick and thin, sudden turns,
ramps running out. We surrender
to distance, nightfall, sunny afternoons,
press send with guilty fingers,
buy plants that need more care
than newborns and watch leaves drop.
We visit for the holidays and stay too long.
We creep away before the party’s over,
paint our skin with sin and indignation,
believe our edges smooth,
though we are jagged as rockslides,
disruptive as hurricanes, with our whispers
and hesitant requests. Our bodies ache,
our brains cannot decide. Not one of us knows
how to read the map, let alone fold it
back down to a neat flat square.
The touch of one fingertip would be enough--
pinprick of warmth along a wrist, tickle
in the soul. We mumble, shuffle, sleep drunk
in strange rooms. We cook too much food,
give money to strangers. Our eyes burn
straining into the map. We think hurting
is love and loving is hurt, that caring for you
feels too much like caring for me.
We are manic and thoughtless, like tadpoles
or bats—why can’t we have wings?
We dream of wings, then remember
the sun and we fall.
A Birthday
Picture a man in a shower. Don’t worry--
by the end you will know more about him
than his bare skin. For example, what kind of work
he does. How his wife takes her coffee.
He is not a tall man, but he is strong.
He lifts his head, lets the falling water beat his face.
His hair is turning gray, just a little, at the temples.
When he leaves for work, his wife is often asleep.
As he is the dog of their marriage, she is the cat--
she likes warm quilts and sleeping in. She likes
strong coffee, which she brews in a French press
every morning and drinks with an inch of cream.
All day he works outside, up and down a ladder,
hammering, hauling shingles, telling men
what to do, while his wife turns the pages
of magazines, walks down the hall to the closed door
at the end. You want to look inside, don't you?
There’s nothing interesting to see. Nobody’s ever slept here,
child or guest. These could be the people on your street
that no one knows. The guy who drives the truck.
The slightly heavy woman who wears her slippers
to the mailbox. You smile; she smiles back.
The old lady whose house is getting a new roof
is drinking. She tilts through the front door
to yell about the noise. But back to the beginning--
the shower. Plenty of hot water. Lavender soap.
Were you thinking it was morning? No.
This man’s day is ending. His birthday.
I should have made a cake for you, his wife says, pleased
with the flowery scent of his neck. He doesn’t care
about cake. He's tired. He just wants to sit
for a minute, quietly considering the small gift
of her hand approaching his knee.
Responsibility for a Heart
When anyone loves you,
their heart turns to glass,
see-through and delicate,
ready to tremble like bells,
sending notes through their blood,
so when they close their eyes,
they hear music. It is heavy,
the responsibility for a heart
not your own. You will never see it,
except in their eyes, a tide
rising and falling, a light dimming
and glowing. You will never
touch it, except on their lips,
a taste made up of time
and pain and everything
they will never tell you.