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New Hampshire Poet Showcase
From NH Poet Laureate, Pat Fargnoli

At my request, The NH Arts Council is providing me with a link to the poet laureate page on their website in order that I may showcase poems by a number of New Hampshire Poets. The poets will be by my invitation only, but I plan to include both the famous and the less famous ....those who are seriously working at poetry craft from many areas of the state. A different poet and poem will be presented every 2 weeks.

Featured Poet: Deming P. Holleran, Hanover

Deming HolleranDeming Holleran has been writing poems for a dozen years, since taking a poetry course in the Dartmouth College MALS Program got her hooked. One of the course professors was Donald Sheehan, then longtime director of The Frost Place in Franconia, and he encouraged her to attend the Frost Place summer conference and festival. After taking this advice, she became involved with The Frost Place as a trustee, and now serves as chair of the Frost Place board. Deming was one of the founders of the Still Puddle Poets, which has been meeting monthly in Hanover for many years, and which has published two books, The Still Puddle Poets and The Still Puddle Poets: New Poems. She has also published poems in The Main Street Rag and Iodine Poetry Journal, as well as in two anthologies from The Frost Place, The Breath of Parted Lips and The Breath of Parted Lips II.

Of her featured poem Deming writes: "the Poem “Into the Mist” came to me during the period of my mother's decline into senility and dementia, when each day brought her into unfamiliar territory, even when she was at home. Writing it, I felt as though a burden had been lifted from my shoulders through the creative transformation of a painful emotional time into poetry."

INTO THE MIST


Fog shawls the silent river
and the islands' shoulders, and a loon call
lingers on the early morning light.
My mother lies in the cool bedroom air
of her house of fifty summers.
She is nearly eighty-eight, and weary,
opening her clouded eyes on one more day.
I see her head propped on pillows, faded
nightgown collar lace barely thinner
than the folds of skin it covers. We
are alone, and she asks where am I?
I cannot answer. I do not really know.
Her voice, my mother's voice, is high,
as hollow as the loon's. She leans
toward me, stretching hands like
sparrow talons searching for a perch.
My hands meet hers, and I am pulled down,
down into the mist, into the pillowed
cloudbank and the withered scent of her,
and I answer from the only place
that matters now, you are with me.

 

Click here for a list of previous Poet Showcases

Last updated: January 9, 2009

 
 
 
 
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