Opening What You Saw and Still Remember is like opening a door that leads away from the news, political debates, from the entanglement of technology and to a quiet garden. It looks at nature with clear eyes. It does not judge nor rage nor cry. It sits peacefully and embraces the beauty around us that is so easily forgotten.
The title is almost misleading. In our busy digital age, the book actually speaks of those things we rarely notice and of what we have almost forgotten.
If you need to step out of chaos and just let the world be its perfect self for a while, then What You Saw and Still Remember can take you there. You’ll see and smell and feel with all your senses the beauty nature gives us.
Here are two poems from What You Saw and Still Remember:
Pastoral
The deer are in disgrace again
for leaping thee back fence
and devouring the lilies.
How can we blame them
when such shameless colors
taunt and tease.
The azaleas are a pale-purple sea.
I want to dive in
with all my senses.
Even the homely wren transforms
from brown to golden as he teakettles merrily
to anyone who will listen.
Let others write in gritty words
their lessons of hopelessness
and heartache. I am content
with the silken language
of a cobweb, the airy balance
of butterfly and birdsong.
…
Dimensions of the Heart
A blue whale’s heart
is the size of a male gorilla,
but human hearts are measured
in more fanciful terms:
as big as Texas, hard as stone.
Soft. Sinking. Restless.
My own fickle heart
craves solitude in a crowd,
company when I’m alone.
All those years by the ocean
and it only wanted mountains,
the smell of blue spruce.
Now it yearns for salt spray and sea weed.
A mild winter. Fresh crab.
Or maybe those whispers of longing
really come from the soul—
that immeasurable space
somewhere between the mind,
with its reason and logic,
and the hollow muscular organ
pumping blood through the body,
oxygen to the brain.
Details:
ISBN: 978-1-59948-646-8
72 pages
Available at Main Street Rag Publishing
About the Poet:
Judith Waller Carroll is the author of The Consolation of Roses, winner of the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Prize, and Walking in Early September (Finishing Line Press). Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Awards include the 2010 Carducci Poetry Prize from Tallahassee Writers’ Association. She lives in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas with her husband, the novelist Jerry Jay Carroll.
Reviews:
“Judith Waller Carroll is a perceptive observer of both the human and nonhuman worlds. She is also a master of the brief lyric poem. Her precise images take hold and settle until the poem’s close, when they stab and sizzle. What You Saw and Still Remember could be labeled poetry of place, as long as places within the human heart are included. Carroll’s finely wrought poems seize our own hearts and do not let go.” –Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012
“This book reads like the comfort of a soft rain and then the sun breaking out after. Carroll’s poems are filled with keen observations of everyday nature and the intricacies of human relationships. They remind their audience, gently, to savor the minutia of each day. Contemplative and intimate, this work, like all good poetry, will call the reader to slow down, to read again.” –Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form
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