Mary Ruth Donnelly to read in Observables Reading Series

Mary Ruth Donnelly, author of Weaving the Light, will read poems on April 8 with Seido Ray Ronci and James Arthur as part of the Observables Readings, sponsored by St. Louis Poetry Center.  Details here.

Pushcart Prize nomination!

Cherry Pie is honored and delighted to announce a nominee this year for the esteemed Pushcart Prize --“Women at Sunrise” by Mary Ruth Donnelly, from her chapbook collection Weaving the Light.

Weaving the Light: review and launch

Mary Ruth Donnelly's Weaving the Light has drawn the attention of Midwest Book Review, which notes it is "a strong pick for those looking for women's poetry with a Midwestern flavor" and that its appearance is yet one more entry "into the fine Midwest Women Poets series."

Read the review here: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/apr_09.htm#poet

This seems a good occasion for a look back at the book launch event held in early March for Weaving the Light. Rick Spencer provided an introduction to the full house at the event. Rick, formerly part of the notable (and, regrettably, no longer published) Delmar Magazine, now teaches philosophy at Southwestern Illinois College. He's given permission to republish here his remarks introducing Mary Ruth Donnelly’s readings from Weaving the Light:

I don’t know why Mary Ruth has such a love for landscape: why she is drawn to riverbanks and plains, the cup-like hollow of a garden, the shape of a road in the hills. But she is. Perhaps it was her upbringing in Kansas City—another river city—a city near the Great Plains? Maybe it is some spatial gene she inherited from ancestors whose lives were all too influenced by the horizon? Nevertheless, it is a theme in her writing: both her prose and her poetry. Her sensitivity to the land lets her see patterns of landscape in film and literature. In poetry, it pushes the levee into the title and the mountain into the metaphor.

I do know why she writes of painful things, of loss, of tears. Poetry is one of the natural habitats for tragedy. In its environment, lamentation is never likely to become an endangered species. But, for an eye sensitive to landscape, poetry becomes more than a place to enshrine that bitter moment we can’t forget. It becomes the place to show us the truth of our losses: the fragility of this life, the vulnerability of us all, the mystery of fate, and the miracle of our carrying on.

While there are many other themes in her book, these two, landscape and loss, standout. Sure, there are trees and women, museums and mammals, art and architecture. However, I am captivated by the beauty of these two.

Then again, I, too, am entranced by the mountains, and made humble by the sky over the plains. I, too, attend to the lessons of my loss, the sacred truths inside of sadness.

It is a wonderful book. Some of the poems I witnessed as the driver, or navigator, of a car in a storm. Other poems are from places I don’t know. Still, they are as familiar as my own home, with its porch light and peeling paint—a welcome banner to me alone. This is to say these poems speak to me. I think they will speak to you as well.


Thank you Rick. Well said.

Arts in Transit 2009 awards

The St. Louis Arts in Transit contest results are in -- this year's winners include Niki Nymark, Catherine Rankovic, and Mary Ruth Donnelly. Their poems will be paraded around town on buses for a year, giving poetry to one of the broadest audiences St. Louis has to offer. Congratulations!
Read the poems here: http://www.artsintransit.org/PIM09.html.

Chapbooks going to Poets House Showcase

The 2008 chapbooks from Cherry Pie Press are making their way to the annual Poets House Showcase. Work by Mary Ruth Donnelly, Niki Nymark, and Erin M. Bertram will be exhibited in the Showcase and then become part of the permanent collection.

Read more about Poets House and the Showcase exhibit here:
http://poetshouse.org/showcase.htm

Chapbook launch March 3 - Weaving the Light

Please join us for readings by Mary Ruth Donnelly from her new and exquisitely lovely chapbook, Weaving the Light, just out from Cherry Pie Press.

When: Tuesday, March 3, 6:30pm – 8pm
Where: Soulard Coffee Garden, 910 Geyer Ave., St. Louis, MO 63104
Note, the reading is in the upstairs room, which involves a flight of stairs
What Else? There will be some light refreshments, and the company of good people.

Here is the full announcement about the chapbook, with sample poems: http://cherrypiepress.blogspot.com/2008/12/weaving-light-by-mary-ruth-donnelly.html

Weaving the Light, by Mary Ruth Donnelly

Mary Ruth Donnelly's new chapbook is looking for readers! Weaving the Light is a pleasure to read, and to re-read.

Donnelly's poetry is informed by both the organic world and the composition / recomposition of art within that world. Many of her poems are a simple walk through a natural setting that opens a reflection on so much more. Others are responses to artistic pieces and tell their own complex and inviting stories. Some are explorations of deep griefs faced, explored and fully encountered, often through nature or art or simply the experience of moving down a road, through the city.

A poem from her Tea Journals series uses a decaying city and a journey, the physical world and the small but brilliant comfort of taste, to locate a purpose for moving forward:

Rooibos Tropica

St. Mary of Victories

Wet, heavy clouds
crowd the ramp to the bridge.
Rain has washed away the morning's snow.
Concrete arches, rust stained,
hoist a precarious railroad bridge
over the river, the bottoms,
and the highway I drive on.
The old Powell Building,
its huge windows shattered,
its red bricks graffitied,
abuts the bridge's entry ramp.
The tower of an old church
anchors a neighborhood
that must have been there
before the highway, warehouses
and empty factories.

As I speed toward this growing dark,
a hint of rose at the back
of my mouth
surprises me,
blue mallow petals and lemon:

a pool of yellow light
a small room in a walkup
a kettle on the stove, a day too short
for the work it held,
some warmth, some sleep.

The poems, in the end, speak for themselves. Here's another one:

Something fine

about the morning,
the mild wind,
Queen Anne’s Lace drift in the meadow
below the wooden porch
and beyond the cropped yard and garden.
Across the draw, the pasture’s
gray waiting, damp, quiet,
turns gold suddenly,
not at all startled
by the sun as it rises
above the oaks.

Weaving the Light (ISBN 978-0-9748468-6-6) is $10. Email Cherry Pie cherrypiepress@yahoo.com) or call or stop by Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO 63108 (ph 314.367.6731).

2008 Chapbooks - coming up!

I am delighted to announce three new chapbooks will be appearing this year from Cherry Pie Press. We haven't firmed up the schedule yet but here are the authors, in probable order of appearance.

Erin M. Bertram is a fellow and instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also plays the accordion, and edits shadowbox press. She is the author of four chapbooks: Alluvium (dancing girl press, 2007); Body Of Water (Thorngate Road, 2007) which won the 2007 Frank O'Hara Award; Here, Hunger (NeO Pepper Press, 2007) with Sarah Lilius; and micro-chapbook Wise Raven (Big Game Books, 2008). New work is forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio; Knockout, and So to Speak.

Here is an excerpt from Erin's forthcoming Cherry Pie chapbook, The Urge To Believe is Stronger Than Belief Itself. The poem is an extended and compressed meditation. It takes the form of closely linked sections of prose poem, poetry, etymology and science as it explores the hard and soft edges, the interior and exterior of relationships among mother and daughter and breast cancer.

Last night I dreamt a bat, sonorous & without charge. Her toes were to be
trusted, a row of tiny nails, the way a nail, driven into a wall, can hold many
times its own weight. She hung herself by a high branch of a conifer with the
others, her leathern wings folded just so across her matted chest.

Niki Nymark is a writer and cafe poet with a unique sense of humor. She says she often writes very personal love poetry, to the embarrasment of her grandchildren. She has been published in several anthologies and been awarded poetry prizes by some of the usual organizations, as well as some unusual ones (and so far she hasn't elaborated on what those might be!).

Here's an excerpt from Niki's poem "Saving Daylight"--

....he runs his hand
along my side,
rubs my shoulder blade
as if it were a seashell he just found,
trying to tease out the shape.

I'm sure her grandchildren are squirming, but the rest of us can enjoy the poem mightily.

And Mary Ruth Donnelly follows, indirectly, the adventurous footsteps of her mother, who skipped school to see Cab Calloway. Mary Ruth has hiked the cliffs above Chaco Canyon and retraced the Missouri River segment of Lewis and Clark’s journey, by car and partially by canoe. Her poems move out and move around – on the rivers and roads of the Midwest and the West – the woods, mountain, badlands, gardens, and cities. In her work, you'll see a search for permanence, for bedrock among the shifting post-modern mindscape and the accidents of life. You'll also see a wide variety of poetry forms, and a quietly strong and sustained voice that will draw you back, again and again.

In her “Coming Back to Mountains” she declares it's

not yet time to forget the mountains
the way they handle space
and nurture aspen
for a while
then break above them,
anthracite peaks piled on each other,
the solace of their jagged silhouette.

She's a surprising poet with a surprising range. Perhaps picking up on that heritage of slipping away to see Cab Calloway, she appreciates the art of dance in all its complicated geometries. From “Tango Pantoum”--

Your eyes are lined in red; my head turned right and down.
Tangueros keep their bodies straight as knives.
The street is dark, a dim bulb lights the narrow stairs.
The floor we rush along is smooth as Gardel’s lament.