What Flies Away
poems by Ann Campanella
ISBN 1-59948-034-4, 80pps., $11
Due for release in early October, the advance discount price of $9 will be available from the Coming Soon page until September 15.
Author Bio / Comments / Samples
What she doesn't know
Today, as wind pushes dried leaves
from poplars and sky turns to steel,
I say to my mother, Let's go for a ride.
We drive a hundred miles, chatting about birds
and insects and other things that fly away, until
the hospital rises like a castle before us.We walk the corridor, she grips my palm.
Rivers of veins rush through her hand.
Our heels make hollow sounds in the hall.
She is afraid of the doctor
whose eyebrows arch like black claws.On the ward, she jokes with the nurses.
This looks like a place for crazies.
Her mouth draws a jagged line across her face.
Orderlies run hands through her suitcase,
empty her purse. They lock up her credit cards,
leather belt, silver nail file. She sits like a child
waiting for instruction, her eyes soft as petals.I hug her shoulders, kiss the crease of her cheek.
You're not leaving me here! and her face folds.She doesn't know that yesterday she walked out
in the rain to find her father who died
long ago, that lightning fractured the sky
and she ran for the woods, slapped my hands
when I tried to lead her inside, cried
when I closed the door, that I slept beside her
last night, my hand on her back. As she drifted off,
my body curled leaf-like around her trunk.
Counterfeit Parents
Waking to the tinkling
of ice filling glasses, the cascade
of laughter, I'd pad in pajama feet
to the landing, my sea-green bunny dusting
the wood floors behind me, and press my face
against the white columns of the banister.In the glow of lamplight, they gathered
at the table, faces behind fans of cards.
The scent of gardenias comes from a woman
who looks like she might be my mother.
She wears flowers and a white scarf. Her hair
curls under at the nape of her neck, while she taps
v-shaped nails on the peanut can, purses red lips,
then whispers words I don't understand.Low moans pour from the stereo.
A chair squeaks as a man leans back. He rubs
the dark stubble of his beard with one hand, cups
the cards with his other. I see the slit of his eyes
as they shift from side to side. There's a fine line
across his lips. This couldn't be my father.
I press my rabbit's furless face to mine.Sometimes, after the others went home,
they'd roll the rugs back and slip off
their shoes. He'd put his hand on the curve
of her hip and they'd drift across the living room,
fingers entwined, legs in time to the swell
of the music. Kneading my bunny,
I'd creep up the stairs and dream of bass tunes
flowing into the slim throats of flowers.
My mother and six-month-old daughter
wear diapers,
communicate in a garbled language
I don't understand,
open their mouths to receive a spoon
though my mother has more teeth
and a wider palate.
If you laid them on a blanket
neither could roll over
though my daughter would try.
They have fine, thin hair
that barely covers the scalp,
but the fire in my mother's has long gone out.Both are forty years apart from me.
My mother and daughter have fingernails
that need constant trimming,
get sponge baths
and could drown in an inch of water,
need help dressing
although neither will need it for long.
They smile at familiar faces,
know I am somehow important to their lives,
but neither has the words to say it.
Both know fear and cry
when the room goes dark and they are alone.
Both squeeze my hand when I am near.
Formerly a magazine and newspaper editor, Ann Campanella turned to creative writing because of the need to focus on things that moved her. Twice, she has received the Poet Laureate Award, the highest honor of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poetry was selected for the Blumenthal Readers & Writers Series by the North Carolina Writers' Network. Her writing, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Main Street Rag, has appeared in local and national publications and anthologies including Chelsea, Crucible, Earth and Soul, Iodine Poetry Journal, Iris, Kakalak, Pembroke, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and many others. Campanella has a degree in English Literature from Davidson College in North Carolina and lives with her husband, daughter and animals on a small horse farm in Huntersville, North Carolina.
In Ann Campanella's remarkable new book of poems, What Flies Away is literally life itself, and the people and animals in it whom we love. The mother is struck with Alzheimer's, the father dies, a beloved horse is put down, the narrator turns forty and feels her own life flying away, and then a baby is born, a miraculous red-headed girl who gives life back not only to the parents but to her grandmother, and of course, to the reader. We are riveted to these poems, as step by step we experience the loss, the grief, the mourning, and then the astounding resurrection. It's a book to read and read again. Every poem in the book is part of the journey, and the journey changes the reader. This is what poetry is about.
Anthony S. Abbott
author of The Man Who
"We all live the way we know how." Ann Campanella's stoic code only underscores the deep feeling in What Flies Away. In this collection of searching poems, loss and sorrow are considered in their dread fullness and the heartache of grief is given resonant voice. But finally, there is hope, belief in tomorrow when "your eyes will be lit with fire/and you will be alive." Here are poems of a faith genuine and bitterly achieved.
Fred Chappell
former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
These poems…are essentially elegies written in advance. They are clear-sighted and unsentimental; at the same time, they are full of sentiment. I look forward to more of Ann Campanella's work.
excerpt from an essay in Chelsea 67
Maxine Kumin
winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry