FootHills Publishing     |   home
Gelineau   |   Darling, Morton   |   Czarnecki   |   Ruggieri, Pruitt, Memmer   |   Huff   |   Desire Vail   |   Bruce Bennett   |   Czury   |   Conners   |   Gilman   |   M J Iuppa   |   Sweet   |   Brown   |   Arsenault   |   Leuzzi   |   Saling   |   MacPherson   |   Good   |   Harrier   |   Coffman   |   Donaghy   |   Coon   |   O'Brien   |   Merrifield   |   Allardt   |   Battelle, Loiselle   |   Gell Center Anthology   |   Ouzoonian   |   Myers   |   Courington   |   Betten   |   Hill-Kaucher   |   Contact FHP

Virginia Elson (1919-2000) was born in Albion, NY, received her MA in English and American literature from Columbia University, and taught for many years in Brockport and Kenmore, NY.  For her last thirty years she lived at Smith Pond, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, first in a cottage close to the water-where she began to write and publish poems, and with a friend founded and for five years published a little magazine, Yes-and later in a new house she and Sarah Curtis built on a hill overlooking the pond.  Her previous publications include a chapbook, Where in the Sun to Stand, and a book, And Echoes For Direction, both from Judith Kitchen's State Street Press, and a renga, Stalking Reflections, written with Linda Allardt and privately printed, as well as many poems in magazines such as The Atlantic, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Yankee, and Poetry Northwest.

This last collection of her poems was edited by Linda Allardt, with the generous assistance of Sarah Curtis and Judith Kitchen.

(Cover photo by Sarah Curtis.)




TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE SUN'S STROKE

Catch       
Re-reading Auden's "Musée Des Beaux Arts"       
News From Ascona       
Metamorphoses       
Before the Colonels' Coup       
Bernice's Garden     
Drive to Town, Kerkyra     
Reprise     
Imagine a Perfect Day     
All Wars Should Be Fought in This Garden     
No Space For Star Wars. . .     
Attempted Suicide     
Maenad     
Another April     
Experiment     
Snapshots in Rome     
Survival     

RELATIVITY

Then And Now     
New House-First Winter     
Telephone Insulators     
Hunt     
Small-Town Laundromat     
Prospero: Paradox     
Selfheal     
Relativity     
Sunset From Papa Joe's, Islamorada     
Weather Vane     
Heron at Islamorada     
Sonnet For Emily Dickinson     
Today's Loaves and Fishes     
Birthday     
Re-Entry     
Harrier     


From the book:

HARRIER

Surely the hawk was out to kill:
field mice knew, tunneling beneath
flat thatches of dry weed stalks,

and the thin grass snake easing itself
out of a sun too suddenly winged by shadow,
seeping down through a crack in the rocks

secret, smooth, seamless
like a spring sucked back to the source.
Certainly it was hawk-hunger that patterned

his dihedral glide and sent him quartering
low across the winter wheat to gyre up slow
on thermals over the fresh-plowed acres.

And it was appetite that finally braked him
for his plunge, talons downstretched
toward the pond's marshy shoreline.

He struck-and missed.  What, then, if not game
delight sent him tilting out over the water,
harrier of his own reflection,
before he soared again?


Harrier is a 44 page paperback, hand-sewn, with flat spine $10.00


TO ORDER  Harrier ON-LINE
    
To order through mail send total price plus $1.25 Shipping and Handling ($1.75 in Canada; $3.25 other countries) for each address sent to.

Send orders to:

FootHills Publishing
PO Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856

Thank you for your support!