(Page Publishing, 91 pages, $12.95 + 2.50 shipping; order from author, Box 8600, Albany, NY 12208 or Paypal to [email protected]; also purchasable from Amazon (click here) or Barnes & Noble (click here); e-book format will be available soon.)
I love being able to say my wife is a poet. Now, a lot of people write poems. But that’s not the same as being a poet. For Therese, poetry is her life. She went back to school in her forties and got a master’s degree in it, and she dedicates herself to her craft with total commitment.
She has published numerous poems and a few “chapbooks,” and won awards and prizes; this full-length collection, Breath Debt, is the culmination of years of intensive effort.
Here Therese deeply mines her own personal experience of life. Of course, such sharing enhances our insight into, and feeling for, the human condition. Isn’t that what poetry is (or should be) mainly about?
A powerful presence in the book is her father. Despite color-blindness, he served in WWII, and then — despite color-blindness! — had a career as a commercial artist. He also long suffered from lung disease, and died of it at 61, when Therese was 21. Thus the title, Breath Debt, as his struggles for breath figure in several of the poems. (The term also relates to breathing while singing.)
Therese and I often have conversations about poetics; our perspectives differ; of course mine are those of a layperson while she has devoted herself to studying the subject and developing her own distinctive voice. This is real poetry, in the truest sense of that word. I admit that much is “above my (literary) pay grade.” (That, in poetry, is what’s called a metaphor. I think.) You will not find here chirpy banalities about sunsets and moonrises (though one poem does play cleverly with the orthography of the word “moon”).
Again, lots of people write poems. But not like this. I salute my wife for a tremendous achievement.
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