“I watch the day decide what to be. Will it be flopping laundry or blank pages filled?” Ann Elizabeth Carson is brilliant at capturing such moments in this deeply contemplative selection, attuned to the way things feel: frozen cracks in the boardwalk crackle/under blanket-muffled babies in big-wheeled strollers. Garden plants remind her of where we all come from and profess: nobody with deep roots can grow in shallow beds. Carson distills a wealth of experience, as form and substance find consummate agreement in precisely crystallized moments and generous narratives. She lays claim to the gifts aging leaves on the shore. Her poems redeem, salvage and console, as in the first swim/of the day, (when she) can’t walk down the slope to the dock … stars/will still beckon tonight through racing clouds. The swimmer, a leitmotif that aptly points to the art of growing old gracefully, is one of many engaging elements in Carson’s work—poetry and prose infused with pragmatic optimism: we have memory so there will be roses in December.
Tom Gannon Hamilton, PhD, author, Panoptic, Aeolus House Press, 2018. Founder, Urban Folk Art Salon.