Mary Jo Homstad

Planning My Escape (eBook, ePUB)

Poetry by Mary Jo Homstad

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A sparkling collection of poetry from the late Iowa poet Mary Jo Homstad (1947-1978). A sensitive and witty craftsperson shares her sense of magic in the people and unique landscape of northeast Iowa, her struggles with the chaos of love and her confrontations with the mystery of death. In his moving Foreword, folk artist Greg Brown writes that Mary's poems "are born in the holy and the daily flies out of them: tomatoes, old bodies, dust, family members." And yet: "Her poems slide easy as water."

A college classmate of Homstad's, who went on to become an English professor at their alma mater, sees Planning My Escape as "the work of a talented young poet whose life was cut short before that talent could be fully developed, a loss for us all. We should think of Keats and the Romantics. Like them, Mary saw a continuity between nature and self, or subjectivity, and used poetry to explore how the experience of one was formative of the other. In her poetry the spiritual inhabits the material world, and the struggle is joined between modern emptiness and the fullness of an open heart."- Nicholas Eric Preus, emeritus professor of English, Luther College.

Most of these 145 poems were previously collected in Weavings, published in 1980, shortly after the poet's death. A first print run of 600 copies led to a second edition. A dozen poems appear here in print for the first time. "Mary thought of herself as a poet," according to her brother Carl. Planning My Escape is likely to make that opinion universal.

You are in for a lively ride.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Carl Homstad Studio and Gallery
• Seitenzahl: 142
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Januar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780578823805
• Artikelnr.: 60935795

Autorenporträt

Mary Jo Homstad was born on March 21, 1947. She died in an automobile accident on December 1, 1978 at the age of 31. The daughter of Dr. Joseph Homstad and Lucy Hanson Homstad, Mary grew up in Denver Colorado. In 1965 she enrolled at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, where she received a BA in English in 1969. After graduation she spent a year teaching English in Japan. She lived in rural Decorah. Mary had many jobs, but she always saw herself as a poet. She would fill small notebooks with thoughts, phrases, overheard dialogue, drafts of poems and quotations from her favorite writers. When she had accumulated several notebooks, she would transcribe and revise the thoughts and poems into a large hardbound volume. She had created several of these volumes when she died. In 1980 her mother Lucy, with the help of Mary's brother Joe and editor Douglas Anderson, put together a book of poems and drawings from Mary's journals called Weavings. The first print run of 600 copies led to a second printing.