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Love And Its Interruptions
Love And Its Interruptions
Love And Its Interruptions
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Love And Its Interruptions

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In spite of new freedoms and new therapies love between men and women is not easy. Elizabeth Elliott's fifth book of poetry has three parts: "First Love First Happiness," "In The Schools Of Love," and "Love And Its Interruptions."She writes, "I am too old to speak about First Love in today's world, but sixty years ago first love was about being unable to speak, about innocence and a kind of thrilled fear. It was not about choice so much as about commitment. Until divorce happened it couldn't happen. But a new freedom beckoned beyond the true sadness, actions were signed into a record and then --freedom is scratching at our eager door. Are we prepared for this freedom? NO. Do we learn? I guess." Eighteen poems have been culled from earlier books, thirty-nine poems are new or never been published. Included is a new concept for poetry, -just a word. Here you'll find insights written by the author behind the scenes for each poem. Elizabeth's poetry explores the human condition in our quests for power and truth, for persistence, justice and hope. On our need for individuality, a purpose, and for achieving our goals with courage and persistence. Her poems show us our innocence and our temptations, our gratitude and appreciation, and our freedom. Our struggle to overcome loss and death, evil and harm, war and conflict and to find love and joy with the healing power of our spirit and our psyche. And our capacity to play, to study nature, science, and time, to create art and beauty, to sense the paradox and to experience the transformation of our lives. Here is the poetry of life, and a life of poetry.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 1, 2015
ISBN9780986297014
Love And Its Interruptions
Author

Elizabeth Elliott

Elizabeth Elliott spent the early part of her life growing up on an island off the coast of Maine. She writes, “From an early age I stood by my mother's chair and in her doorway and watched her paint. How could it not seem completely natural for me to have a pencil in my hand and write? (I still have an encyclopedia I wrote in 1942 when I was ten.) I am the lucky child of four unusual creative parents that were deeply involved in the world (two step-parents were acquired shortly after the end of the war). I asked my father, who had dedicated his life to improve the world once if he thought he'd gotten anywhere. He said he thought of himself as a Johnny Appleseed, dropping seeds of fruitful new ideas that would gradually be picked up, planted and grown. Since then nothing has arisen to deter my love of people, and my love of writing poetry. Unremitting care for the world is my passion. So at the age of 75, having received only rejections for my poetry, I decided to publish my own books, using covers of my own choosing, and writing on the subjects of my life: children and human issues, love and politics, religion and the arts --the world I experience all around me every day so I can share it with my readers.” Today Elizabeth still resides on the island off the Maine coast, but also spends her time in the hills of western Massachusetts and the islands of the Florida Keys with her wonderful poetry reading, history minded, art imbued husband. Elizabeth once said that she could feel a poem begin in her core and travel up within her body, down her arm, and out onto the page. And the results, the books she has published and are yet to be published, describe the conflict men and women find in ourselves and with each other, nature, our purpose and goals, our beliefs, and also the hope and healing we find in our spirit as we are transformed by the passage of time.

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    Book preview

    Love And Its Interruptions - Elizabeth Elliott

    Love And Its Interruptions

    Poems

    ***

    By Elizabeth Elliott

    www.elizabethelliottpoetry.com

    Published by Winter Press LLC

    www.winterpresspublishing.com

    dedicated to the truths

    of

    love and beauty

    Distributed by Smashwords

    Discover these other titles by Elizabeth Elliott:

    Burn All Night (1998)

    Placate The Jaws(2010)

    Winter Ferry(2008)

    Copyright 2015 Elizabeth Elliott

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior authorization of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    ISBN 978-0-9862970-1-4 (Epub)

    Cover Painting Build-Up #3 by Brita Holmquist copyright 2009.

    Cover Design by Kat Moran

    PREFACE

    Love & Its Interruptions is my first book with a single theme. The theme is love and the poems arrive on these pages from every decade of my writing life. As they were being assembled I was surprised how easily they fell together as one story, a story divided into three parts. But how could they not tell a story?

    Parts One and Three are fairly predictable but Part Two, In The Schools of Love, took me back to the seventies when I was a newly divorced woman working and living in Soho, Manhattan, going to college, writing poetry, teaching poetry. What a knotty, amazing, personal time. I knew many single men and women, and more often than not, these poems tell their stories rather than my own. Four in particular shocked me into a high degree of empathy for situations where life is dramatically and brutally curtailed.

    I am introducing into this preface Lucky the Girl, a poem I wrote in the seventies and published in Burn All Night under the title, The Body's Joy. It was written for Anne Sexton because of her poem Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman. As the girl in the poem is asleep, we meet her mother and hear the words of a mother all daughters deserve --and many must do without.

    When the poems are complete there is a section called just a word -. These words are not notes on the poems, not comments, certainly not explanations. They are separated by a blank page so the poems can stand alone. I was asked to do this and was surprised when it was pleasure, not a chore.

    Elizabeth Elliott

    August 2014

    Lucky The Girl

    Lucky the girl whose mother sees womanhood

    begin to bloom upon her daughter

    and can accept and love that this be so;

    Lucky the girl whose mother does not see

    this fruitfulness of summer on its way

    and out of envy burn the crop

    with remarks that wither, deprecate,

    or fill with fear;

    Lucky the girl who can lie in fever,

    trusting her face into the hand of she

    who gave her birth, and while she sleeps

    her mother dreams for her,

    the pleasures of her body,

    beginning to come near;

    These pleasures, so acute they take the form

    of lemons that become a map of all the world,

    and this becomes the way her body,

    when she's born a second time,

    will know geographies of love;

    Geographies of continental drift,

    of hands and eyes and cunt and skin,

    geographies of sweat and swamp and lakes at morning

    when the mutual greeting of a smile

    is all the world has need of to insure

    its long, primordial spin;

    For all is swelling here;

    behind the heat of fever in her face

    the garlic buds engorge,

    and nearby apples begin their swell,

    though true, till now,

    she's been more like the promise of a bean;

    Lucky the girl whose mother does not take alarm,

    but says to her daughter,

    Darling, let your

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