The poems in Marg Walker's new collection reflect on life's seeming certainties - what we think is true of ourselves and others - exploring new perspectives opened as time and events disrupt these perceptions. Several poems focus on the child's simplicity of heart, the hidden lives of parents, and the contradictions of tenderness and distance within a family. There are moments of humor as well as unresolved silences as she interrogates memory, reconsiders inherited beliefs, and finds startling recognition of common ground.
In other poems we feel the ache of COVID isolation, the loss of friends to death, and the irreversible toll of time. Whether through quiet contemplation, lighthearted scenes, or vivid dreaming, we travel with the poet toward discovery of what lies at the heart's core - things that cannot change or be taken away. Among them is the recurrent presence of beauty. Let me not fail to praise, she writes, and in poem after poem we feel the currents of gratitude that are central to her work. Here is a book that radiates with the shock of pleasure just to be alive.
Marg Walker is a lifelong writer who pursues her abiding interest in the human voice through poetry and choral music. During her professional career, Marg specialized in narrative inquiry as a source of learning for foundations and nonprofits working in the human services and the arts. Currently, Marg is a co-curator of the Midstream Reading Series in the Twin Cities, and a member of Unity Singers, an a cappella ensemble. She has collaborated with choral artists to create programs of music and poetry for public performance, living room salons, and most recently, an audiobook. Marg's poems have appeared in numerous publications, and several poems have been chosen as texts for new music composed for solo voice or chorus. Marg has one adult son. She lives with her husband in St. Paul, Minnesota.
"At the heart of this book is the shock of pleasure just to be alive. In poem after poem Marg Walker returns us to this shock, to this pleasure. What a beautiful gift for a book of poetry to offer. Wrapped inside this gift are the surprises the poems so often embody, the unexpected turns, the sudden moments of humor or of an awareness so startling it is like lightning on a dark night. 'For a moment /there was no difference between my soul and song,' Walker writes in one of her brief 'For a Moment' poems. Fortunately for us, there are many such moments in this collection. This is a truly wonderful book." — Jim Moore, author most recently of Enter and Underground.
"Marg Walker writes beautifully about the breathing kinship of living things. Beyond her kinship with the living, she is also generous and wise and precise about the dead, building throughout her book the complicated web of connection between self, family of origin, and family of choice. This poet honors in some extraordinary ways the summons to mystery. The book is devoted to the mysteries of love, to a commitment to the natural world, the cultural and political world, and beyond that, devoted to where she perceives the sacred, however imperfect it may seem. We are grateful for the hand this poet extends to us. A beautiful book has arrived in our world." — Deborah Keenan, Author of eleven collections of poetry and a book of writing ideas
"Dreams grace and haunt this moving book—dreams in all their strangeness, but also their power to teach. Marg Walker asks them imaginatively for their meaning, sharing their lessons so we might do the same. They're a powerful part of the case she makes for the deep uncertainty of being human. But here also is the sure beauty of music. This poet's love of music, especially singing, lights the collection. She captures a magical instant in choir; she writes rhythm into each line, each word: …orchids in a shuttered conservatory / aching with unused beauty. Our steps through this world may be uncertain, but over and over in this gorgeous collection Walker points to the wonders that accompany us." — Brian Newhouse, Former Managing Director of Classical Minnesota Public Radio and author of A Crossing.
