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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.
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 at https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/after-all-by-pat-daneman-reviewed-by-gail-goepfert) 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) |
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