Valediction

by Linda Parsons

Overview

Paul Éluard writes, “There is another world and it is in this one.” Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives’ oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality—always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. The hybrid nature of Linda Parsons' sixth collection, Valediction, with poems, diptychs, and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening meditations. In this striving, we are balanced and grounded with her as she lifts the veil on what it means to live and create fully, even in the face of impermanence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956440621
Publisher:	Madville Publishing
Publication date:	06/20/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019). Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives and gardens.

Read an Excerpt

Light Around Trees in Morning

So much light, I think it’s caught fire, 

the paperbark maple self-immolating—

but it’s only the coppery scrolls’ silhouette 

facing east. Someone once important 

to me planted this tree, led friends to this 

very spot as if it were the only blaze, 

the garden’s only crown. 

 

Importance ebbs in time, keeping its own 

mystery, and we’re left on our knees, 

in cinders, smoldering ash, as I was, 

turning to what’s more important—

clover in the iris, stones overrun 

with chocolate mint, the scrawl 

of minor serpents to read and expel. 

 

A woman alone makes good headway 

in the weeds, my corona unscrolling 

like fiery swords at the entrance of nothing 

and everything Edenic. Sometimes I think 

light comes only when we’re bowed 

too low to notice our leaves and limbs 

burnished by morning, our bodies 

in spontaneous combustion.

Table of Contents

Contents

I

3  Light Around Trees in Morning

4  Airing It Out

5  Visitation: Necessary

6  Between Dog and Wolf

7  A Woman Dreams a Cow in Her Dining Room

8  Valediction

9  April Wish

10  House Spirit

11  Visitation: October

12  October Foot Washing

13  Visitation: Rising

14  Dust to Dust

15  Come Home

16  All Night, All Day

17  My Angels Speak in Dreams, on the Radio,
         at the Railroad Crossing

18  Visitation: Bright

II

21  Everywhere and Nowhere at Once

22  Garden Medicine

23  Visitation: Winged

24  Overtaken

26  Black Widow

27  Broken, Not Shattered

29  Visitation: Hungry

30  Waiting

31  Visitation: Figs

32  Golden Girl, Old Town Prague 

34  Visitation: Porch

35  Worry Stone 

36  Visitation: Havana

37  Instead

38  Visitation: Frost

III

41  Night Guard

42  Putting Him On

43  August, Still

44  Rooted

45  The Hissing of Knoxville Lawns

46  Roy G Biv

47  Visitation: Conjunction

48  Recipe for Troubled Times

49  My Daughter Says Basket

50  Visitation: Mother

51  Speaking So Loud Without Words 

52  Princess Slip

53  Visitation: Princess

54  Checkers with My Granddaughter

55  The Motherhouse Road

56  How Soft the Earth

57  Arias to the Bees

58  Unhinged

IV

61  Why I Write About Eggs

62  My Mother’s Feet

63  From a Distance

64  Travels with My Father

65  The Malecón 

66  My Father and Fidel

67  Romeo y Julieta 

68  Elegant Decay

69  Home, Not Home

70  Visitation: White

71  Glimmer Trail

72  Many Mansions

73  Visitation: Light

74  Believe

 

76  Acknowledgments

79  About the Author