Poets and Poems: Laurie Klein and "House of 49 Doors"

Begin with a house. Perhaps it’s the house you grew up in. Or the house you remember best as a child. I can remember lying awake at night, looking at how the hall light made a triangular shadow on my bedroom door, and forever associating that shadow with the murmur of my parents’ voices in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but hearing the murmur was always reassuring. 

Memories float through that house, some vivid and some vague. The house is its own presence, but it also serves as a kind of table of contents or a framework surrounding what we really remember from our childhoods. And that’s usually the people – parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, and relatives. It’s odd that some of my sharpest memories of my maternal grandmother and my aunts, uncles and cousins are associated with my own house and not theirs. Perhaps it’s because our house was the gathering place for family celebrations and holiday dinners, and my relatives always stood out more clearly in a different environment from their own.

In House of 49 Doors: Poems, Laurie Klein starts and ends with a house, too – the Fowler house. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Happy National Poetry Month! – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Ekphrastic Challenge 2024, Day 1  and Day 2 – Paul Brookes at The Wombwell Rainbow.

 

“Easter Morning:” James Matthew Wilson reads the poem by Joseph Bottum – Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Miracle of ‘Ben-Hur,’ Hollywood’s Tastiest Christo-Zionist Epic – Thomas Doherty at Table Magazine. 

At the Monument – Spitalfields Life.

Poets and Poems: Laurie Klein and “Where the Sky Opens”

How do you deal with what many insurance companies rather blandly call “major life events,” those significant happenings that allow you to change your insurance policies? We know what they mean – the death of a spouse, parent, or child; a divorce; a new baby.

But many other life events can be called major and significant – a physical move to a new home, new part of the country, or even a new country; a serious illness; spouses separating; a family crisis that leads to division and walls; perhaps even a spouse changing his or her philosophy of life – the one you’ve known for years, the one that’s helped to anchor you as well as your spouse. Suddenly, and it can be sudden, life is unhinged. The ground has shifted; the landscape has become unfamiliar.

That is the sense of Laurie Klein’s newly published collection of poems, Where the Sky Opens: A Partial Cosmography. What was known as normal and established has disappeared, sometimes within ourselves, and something new has to be recognized and charted.

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

Top photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.