Megan Willome’s “The Joy of Poetry”

Certain images of my mother stick in my head, the earliest being her reading to me from a tall green edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Other images crowd in: holding me in her arms as we watched the dogcatcher take our Boston terrier away (no treatment for mange existed at the time); the room mother bringing cupcakes when I was in third grade; the expert manager of garage sales; the long weekend when I visited during her recovery from surgery when she was 89, and how she talked about her life before she married my father.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, I realized that she was a person who was more than just my mother, a person with hopes and dreams, challenges and disappointments, happiness and grief.

That realization permeates The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life with Poems by Megan Willome. It’s a book about poetry, yes, but it is a book about how poetry becomes an important facet of the large and small events of one’s life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.