Rosary of Bones, Poems by Jennifer MacPherson
In
Rosary of Bones, Jennifer MacPherson confronts silence and evanescence,
and finds what endures: the body, the physical world, in all their music and
solidity:
In this impossible silence
I believe
everything with meaning will dissolve,
run off limbs of trees in the midday sun.
Yet nothing is lost:
the great mill of the world will return,
green cloth will unroll from the spool,
weavers will sing.
Sample Poems by Jennifer MacPherson
"The body itself, and the accounting of its days and nights, is the rosary this poet passes through her handsand the ensuing song is a heart-breaking comfort. Jennifer MacPherson writes with the authority of a grown woman. Rosary of Bones is a hymn to the life we live now."--Marie Howe, The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), What the Living Do (Norton, 1998)
"The world of Jennifer MacPherson's poems is a world of bone, breakable and imperfect; a world of loss and mystery, of desire and hope. Meticulously made, not a word too many, not a word out of place, the poems dare to ask 'the heart's mad questions.' Finally, they are a tending toward prayera rosary, perhaps, or a 'singing at the execution,' a marveling at the resiliency of the human spirit. I love these poems; so will you."--Patricia Fargnoli, New Hampshire Poet Laureate, Necessary Light (Utah State, 1999), Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo, 2005)
"A fan of Jennifer MacPherson's poetry, I have, since first experiencing her work, admired its scope, but with this new collection Rosary of Bones, I have come to a fuller appreciation of the depth of her accomplishments. This is poetry as bone: physical and immanent. This is poetry as rosary: spiritual and transcendent. She combines these worlds brilliantly in this book of astonishments where painful recognition of loss is followed by hard-earned redemption. The prayer and the singer become one in the recognition that 'nothing is lost:/ the great mill of the world will return,/ green cloth will unroll from the spool,/ weavers will sing.' And Jennifer MacPherson's voice will be prominent among those weaver-singers." --Patrick Lawler, A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough (University of Georgia, 1990), Feeding the Fear of the Earth (Many Mountains Moving, 2006)
Jennifer MacPherson is a founding editor of The Comstock Review. Her work has been published widely in such journals as Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Calyx, Pearl, The Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, and Primavera. She is the author of a 2002 chapbook, Stuck in Time from Pudding House, which also published her Greatest Hits (2001), A Nickel Tour of the Soul (FootHills, 2004), and In the Mixed Gender of the Sea (Spire, 2004), which won the Spire Press Poetry Book Award. A former school psychologist, she lives in Syracuse, NY, with her ocicats, Tango and Samba. In her spare time, she is a gourmet cook, amateur gardener, ballroom dancer, and obsessive reader of everything.
ISBN 978-1933456799, 80 pages, $17.00