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Local News for a Global Village | www.VoiceSB.com
January 29, 2021
Poetic VOICE
We Are So Happy
Peg Quinn • Mother Lode Editor’s Choice • Gunpowder Press, 2021 By Richard Jarrette / Special to VOICE
I bring the boys dark, juicy plums. Something sweet for someone’s sons. – Peg Quinn
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OU CAN FEEL WAVES OF SPARKLING DELIGHT flowing from Santa Barbara—our own Peg Quinn has a debut poetry collection right off the press. I am not the only one who has been collaring Gunpowder Press publishers David Starkey and Chryss Yost for years to publish this solidly good and consistent presence. Master poets and poet laureates are Peg Quin n unified in praise for Mother Lode—abrazos y besos many. Years ago she won an essay contest through Adult Ed awarding her a scholarship with Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference. She fell in with poetry master teacher Perie Longo, SB Poet Laureate Emerita, who roused her already waking gift. Now this is what Perie has to say printed straight out in Peg’s book—“Peg Quinn’s poems in Mother Lode are songs that pull you ‘like a sturdy hand toward the dance floor’ that is her life. They embrace the earthiness of Nebraska fields where her childhood is ‘planted,’ the holiness of nature where a barn is a ‘cathedral,’ the ocean a place of ‘worship,’ and death in its sorrow or horror, a ‘reckoning.’ She writes with a grace and voice uniquely hers. I found myself bowing after each poem.”
Cautious Horses Eyed Us Great-Uncle Ed said if we could grab one of the carp swimming in the horse tank down by the barn, we could take it home. With sleeves rolled to our shoulders, arms dangling in cold water, bodies baking in the sun, cautious horses eyed us. As we justified details of how the last one got away, an enormous, indifferent fish eased up from the depths just out of reach. We’d spring for the catch, brushing just a slip of life as it moved past, leaving us thrilled by the feel of an empty grasp. Poetry is the say of the unsayable and great poets look at their great poems with
a rueful “almost maybe” and because they are artists try again, and again. And there above Master Quinn lays it all right in our arms—“an empty grasp” that thrills. This is her genius. Of herself she says, “I’m ever-thankful for my childhood in rural Nebraska. I don’t remember having toys, but a treehouse and a tire swing, fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, a sandbox, and nearby woods where the only rule was, ‘Be home by sundown.’ We could fish, swim, endlessly explore the woods, and sled down the creek banks in winter. I remember watching my family watching TV, their faces lit by the screen, and I’d take off for the woods. I’m guessing it created a very calming psychological foundation. I never flinch at wind driven rainstorms in California, having walked a mile to school in blizzards. There were no options.” Still, she chose a brave path by majoring in Art at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where an elective poetry class with Greg Kuzma was the most memorable.
her major influences and I know he will love her book. One of Ted’s best friends, our own Dan Gerber, has this to say on the back cover of Mother Lode—“Peg Quinn brings the visual acuity of a fine painter to the poems of her debut collection. Her depictions of life often elicit a familiar echo and a sense of wonder in our experience of a world we look at everyday and most often don’t see. These are fine poems from the very heart of things.” Like Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), one of the “four immortals” of Japanese poetry, and Juan Ramon Jiménez (1881-1958), Nobel Prize for Literature 1956, she manifests a profound empathy and tenderness toward the world. Nesting Season for Chris In a nested dent of drain pipe swaying above the library door a wren is calling his mate— silent, she waits, toes curled on the edge of the garden gate, before singing her reply. When we met for lunch, you smelled of pine.
I watched you flirt with the girl behind the counter, as she nervously refolded perfectly-folded napkins. Poem after poem, Peg Quinn delivers the unsayable, the unreachable, right here, again and again—Mother Lode (Gunpowder Press, 2021) www.gunpowderpress.com. Her own painting graces the cover, and blesses there. Richard Jarrette is author of Beso the Donkey (2010), A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (2015), The Beatitudes of Ekaterina (2017), The Pond (2019), and Strange Antlers (Fall 2021).
Someone’s Sons Glancing in his rearview mirror the foreman cracks a beer, floors his monster truck and roars away leaving two illegal boys on their knees above my steaming driveway, filling cracks with bottled blacktop. I bring them paper masks, simple borders between toxic dust and young, well-traveled lungs, hand them cans of coconut water. Earlier, I’d read a message from my son, rear-ended by a motorcycle last night on the Hollywood Freeway, everyone pulled over, first-responders there in minutes— no one seriously injured. I bring the boys dark, juicy plums. Something sweet for someone’s sons. I’ve always thought of Peg as a kind of Grapes of Wrath character bearing memory of a flour sack dress—one bare foot in a Nebraska barnyard and the other one on Santa Barbara shores washing it from between her toes, flower and seagull feather in her hair, holding John Keats’ Sonnets aloft above the waves. She’s a sophisticated educator, fine painter, and terrific poet simpatico with Nebraska’s Ted Kooser who never quit his day job as an insurance underwriter, yet a Pulitzer Prize winner and USA Poet Laureate Emeritus. I do believe him to be one of
UCSB MULTICULTURAL CENTER PRESENTS
CUP OF CULTURE SERIES
When the Emperor mobilizes his troops to fight the onslaught of invaders from the North, a young Chinese maiden disguises herself as a male warrior in order to take the place of her ailing father under the name Hua Jun, setting her on an adventure that will transform her into a legendary warrior. 2 hrs, 2020
ONLINE FILM SCREENING WED, MAR 3RD, 6PM PST Zoom Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/92939106309
To uphold our weekly film screenings and discussions, we will be transforming our cup of culture series into a virtual setting. Every Wednesday, we will watch a documentary or movie as a collective and we will have a post-film discussion afterwards.