from the foreword by Anna Mundow "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," John Keats declares in a letter to a friend in 1818. And Dorothy Johnson, writing a little over two hundred years later, has reached the same conclusion. "I cannot force a poem/like an amaryllis/in a pot . . . ," she observes in one of the many gems that make up this collection. A stray thought or memory, a change in the weather, a recent death, an ancient myth-any one of them may alight like a bird at her backyard feeder, demanding attention and sparking her imagination.…mehr
from the foreword by Anna Mundow "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," John Keats declares in a letter to a friend in 1818. And Dorothy Johnson, writing a little over two hundred years later, has reached the same conclusion. "I cannot force a poem/like an amaryllis/in a pot . . . ," she observes in one of the many gems that make up this collection. A stray thought or memory, a change in the weather, a recent death, an ancient myth-any one of them may alight like a bird at her backyard feeder, demanding attention and sparking her imagination. Then, gradually and mysteriously, her "moment of vision," as another English poet once described it, becomes something that we, too, can see and feel. Some of the poems here are like good jokes. They take us by surprise-ever thought about gravity and . . . gravy? Others touch the heart, as Dorothy, in her dedication, imagines cardiac surgeons doing when they replaced her leaky valve. Still others capture the anxieties and absurdities of our current times. But thanks to Dorothy's light touch-which has been perfected over a lifetime of reading and writing-the overall effect, whatever the subject, is delightful. As you read, you may feel as though you have been welcomed into her kitchen where a variety of objects, some whimsical, some elegant, catch the eye. Then you realize that somehow all four seasons of the New England year along with a handful of ancestors and an assortment of Greek gods has materialized at the table. This sly magician has conjured them all-and more-out of thin air. And what a feast it is.Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.
Playwright and poet Dorothy Johnson has regaled, captivated, and challenged many audiences over the years. Resident of New Salem, Massachusetts, since 1971, Dorothy operated the Common Reader Bookshop there with her partner, Doris Abramson, until their retirement in 2000. Long a bibliophile, she worked with MacMillan publisher in New York City in the 1950s and has, among much wider reading, encountered all of Dickens several times over. She wrote the script and lyrics for musical comedies she directed for New Salem's 1794 Meetinghouse. Composers Andrew Lichtenberg and Steven Schoenberg provided the music. A hallmark of her playwriting oeuvre involves capitalizing on the idiosyncrasies of players mimicking themselves to comic effect. Known for her pungent quick wit and humble, decent heart, Dorothy grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1933. Her family left a rented farm in Enfield, Massachusetts, one of the towns drowned to make way for Quabbin Reservoir to serve Greater Boston. Dorothy attended public schools through ninth grade, when she went to Macduffie School for Girls in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1950. She holds a BA in English from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley and an MA in theatre from Smith College in Northampton. Her work experience, she says with understatement, has involved office work in New York City, shelving books in a library, selling hamburgers, hawking antiques, purveying gift shop merchandise, offering used and sometimes rare books, and teaching at Holyoke Community College and Xavier University in New Orleans. Dorothy began writing the poems in My Heart Remembers with "Shepherds" in 2019. She writes the "Quiet Places" column for Uniquely Quabbin magazine.
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