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Patricia Roth Schwartz
(bio)


 "Patricia Roth Schwartz's compelling poems unflinchingly address family's history and history's family, and we are the better for it. Hers is a voice of empathy and grace, a voice that reminds us in all ways to be mindful of  `the other.'"                                                                                                          
Thom Ward -  Small Boat with Oars of Different Size and
Various Orbits, Carnegie-Mellon Press

"Patricia Roth Schwartz says, 'To live long is to remember/what things are called.'  She remembers.  These are intrepid poems, opening the dark rooms of family, of love, finding possibility.  Her ear for speech has perfect pitch.  Most at home in her herb-scented garden, her land, tuned to her world, she rings true."       
Linda Allardt -  Accused of Wisdom,  FootHills Publishing

 "Patricia Roth Schwartz explores the rigorous claims of family and earth, of memory and desire, as if  'uprooting regret/from the mind's terrain.'  In a voice that accommodates waves of joy and sorrow, fearlessly pursuing the telling detail, she allows us to experience through language 'that explosion of grace/rare as deep touch.'"
Kathleen Wakefield -  Notations on the Visible World, Anhinga Press

"What a pleasure to read Patricia Roth Schwartz's new book of poems, to see how the work of poet and gardener find such fruitful common ground.  Whether celebratory or elegiac, deeply personal or widely political, Schwartz's poems take us in with their rich, tactile textures, their insistence that we attend-'like a fingertip/ held to a pulse'-to the unsung and ordinary moments of our lives."                                                                                    
Ralph Black -  Turning Over the Earth,  Milkweed Editions

"Reading the poetry of Patricia Roth Schwartz is like visiting a splendid aunt who left her husband for a delightful and potentially dangerous 'other woman.'  Reflected in the lovingly detailed images is a deep respect for language."
Bruce Sweet -  What I Really Wanted, FootHills Publishing




From the book:

PLANTING BULBS IN A TIME OF WAR

                      October 2001


A morning for choices: bed,
the muzzy drone of half-sleep,
the sinking heart-or instead, thick socks,
rubber clogs, a sharp trowel in gloved hands,
the garb of earth's midwife.

Out under the struggling sun, the lifting breeze,
you bend to work, a swarm of lady-bugs
clings to the porch door; beyond
the dying tomatoes, sumac warms
the field of fading goldenrod.
Hunkered on rain-damp ground,
deep into each hole you've dug
you press one bulb, tear-shaped;
like the ancient Egyptians
leaving the dead food for the journey,
you scatter bone ground fine as ash.

Last night with fierce surprise
you found yourself calling down
from the pale stars your parents,
as if this time they'd enter their lives
capable of comforting, but really
what you ached for was just a chance
to ask, before dark fell, for one
last story, the one you never thought
you'd need to hear:

        What was it like
when a moment arrived--like a fingertip
held to a pulse--when a hawk's shadow
dropped over the day?  Afterward then,
still childless, apart, did each of them dare
to conjure a future that one day arrived?--
a station platform, a baby whose picture
they'd pose atop a globe of the world,
then print up for cards at Christmas.

And here you still are this morning, still riding
that spinning world, the sun your incantation,
after so many burials ready to catch,
when it comes--as it must--the howling
spring, writing the story yourself, not
the final chapter but the next, deep under
your broken fingernails
ashes and dirt.



WALKING THE LABYRINTH AT ROWE
IN MY 57TH YEAR

             October 12, 2003

                                I am not done with my changes.
                                                               --Stanley Kunitz
                                                                  "The Layers"



walking   lichen   fern

this green earth holds me up

circle of stones   hummocks of thyme

center of stone   curves closer

walking   curves closer   walking

curves closer   draws away   turns again  

this sojourn begins   arcs into

darkness    turning toward winter   circle

of stones   walking   fern   lichen

hummocks of thyme   center of stone

draws away   this green earth holds

me up   world as lover   sole companion

walking   curves closer   further away

center of stone   turns   arcs into

darkness   hummocks of thyme   lichen



GOLDFINCH POEM


Five o'clock in the afternoon,
fifteen finches decorate my feeder,
delicate, ingenious, as if crafted
by Faberge--although for who
really did make them, I haven't
a name.

               That old pine
I've been urged to smite
down to kindling
is clearly their home.

Lighting here now myself
in stillness, for once, lawn chair
in shade, to write,
yellow pad on my knee,
I watch:

                back and forth to those
aged shaggy branches where dead
wood mixes with new, green-gold
feathers of growth bright as their
summer backs, I see them dart.

These birds have settled
into my care: as one who's had
a haven betrayed, I know
just how they're going to feel,
swooping back one day
on a homing flight, oblivious,
unprepared, only to realize-
through layer after layer of forcing
eye and disbelieving mind to reconcile--
that where once sanctuary
so firmly stood
now only remains
the shimmering air. 



Patricia Roth Schwartz, poet and fiction writer, grows herbs and perennials on her 35 acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, in Waterloo, in the Finger Lakes region of central New York.  She teaches at The Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, as well as volunteering to conduct an ongoing poetry workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, New York.  Her work has been widely published in small press journals, as well as in book form.

Born in West Virginia on Columbus Day in 1946, Pat has also lived in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut.  She holds two degrees in English, from Mount Holyoke College (B.A.) and Trinity College, (M.A.), plus one in counseling psychology from Antioch/ New England (M.A.).  Having taken early retirement to both write and pursue her prison work, as well as other projects, she worked previously in Boston as a psychotherapist in private practice, then in this region as an adjunct instructor in both English and psychology for several colleges as well as Cayuga Correctional Facility.

In June 2002 Pat received an ImageOut poetry award in Rochester, and was a Finalist in 2003 and 2004. She was also selected as a Finalist in the Willamette Poetry Contest from The Clackamas Literary Review in 2004, as well as the Sow's Ear Poetry Contest, 2004.  She has appeared in the Genesee Reading Series at Writers & Books as well as in numerous other readings including poetry for peace.  Pat served for several years as a volunteer co-coordinator for a regional summer poetry festival held at Writers & Books' Gell Center for the Arts.  She was also co-facilitator of Rochester's "Wilde/ Woolf Society," an lgbt writers' support group, and is now a member of "Just Poets."

Pat is working currently on another full-length manuscript, The Crows of Copper John: the History of Auburn Prison in Poems, a portion of which was presented in November 2004 in a readers' theatre format in Rochester as a benefit for CEPHAS, a former inmates' halfway house.



ISBN 0-941053-62-8

Planting Bulbs in a Time of War is a 72 page hand-sewn book with spine - $15.00


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