Discussion → Cervena Barva Press Announces A New Poetry Chapbook, "Mud Season" by Pamela Annas

• 
  Gloria Mindock

  Jul 12, 02:46pm

  
  

  Cervena Barva Press Announces a New Chapbook
  "Mud Season" by Pamela Annas
  
  Pamela Annas grew up in the Navy, constantly moving from country to country. She singlehandedly raised a child who’s now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts Boston, member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher , author of a Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, Literature and Society and Against the Current . She looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement and in the meantime is quite pleased to see this first chapbook appear beautifully in print from Cervena Barva Press.

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  "What resonates most clearly and powerfully in Pam Annas’s Mud Season is her ability to assume a variety of distinctive voices, and in so doing, speak from a variety of experiences. This is made possible because of the poet’s good ear for a diction that is not present simply to announce or decorate or please, but instead to carefully lure the reader into the lives she inhabits in order to tell a fresh and illuminating story of who we are."
  --Bruce Weigl

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  Clotheslines

  Back of the Navy housing project
  the women hang the laundry.
  Under a thin morning sun, braced
  against a keening wind, my mother lifts
  wet towels out of the wicker basket
  heaves them to the curving clothesline
  higher than the top of her head
  and a late setting sickle moon.
  I hand up the wooden pegs one by one
  adrift in a cotton trance.

  The back yards are a harbor of sails
  rippling in the icy breeze.
  Freezing stiff, cotton diapers
  are lined up in ranks on review.
  My brother and I play hide and seek
  among the swaying sheets, or crouch
  between two lines as in a bivouacked
  tent, telling stories of heroes and feasts.
  Rows of back doors, scuffed dirt,
  a red tricycle.

  Family uniforms come off the line
  in a fading yellow afternoon. We
  slide the pegs back into their cloth bag,
  stack frozen diapers in the basket.
  Red chapped hands wrapped
  around mugs of hot chocolate thaw
  in the cramped steamy apartment.
  Clean clothes relax into tenderness
  throwing off a fresh cold scent,
  silver notes from a Celtic harp.

  My mother's life, the story of a day:
  gathering, washing, hanging, drying,
  sorting and folding, putting away.

  40 Pages / Poetry
  

  For more information:
  http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html

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