Official New Hampshire website
NHSCA logo 50th anniversary tagline

 

 nh arts home
 program services
trans div
 arts & artists
   artist rosters
   poet laureate
   artist laureate
   fellows
 
 
trans div
nh folklife
 grants
 news & calendar
 FAQs
 links
 about us
 site map
     

 

 


Arts & Artists  
    

New Hampshire Poet Showcase
From NH Poet Laureate, Walter E. Butts

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 continue to showcase poems by a number of New Hampshire Poets. The poets will be by my invitation only, but I plan to include those who are seriously working at their craft from many areas of the state.

Featured Poet: Martha Andrews Donovan, Henniker

Martha Andrews DonovanMartha Andrews Donovan was educated at Williams College (B.A.) and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English (M.A.). She has been teaching for twenty-six years and is the recipient of several summer fellowships as well as the Charles P. Rimmer Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Pingree School. Her poems and essays have appeared in English Journal, Entelechy International, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, Marlboro Review, Off the Coast, the anthology The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices From the Robert Frost Place, Volume II (CavanKerry Press, 2004) and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Dress Her in Silk was released May 2009 from Finishing Line Press. She is Associate Professor of Writing at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire where she lives with her husband and daughter, a world away from the India of her mother’s youth.

“Her Story” is the first poem in Dress Her In Silk, a collection of poems that places my mother’s dying of cancer in the context of her unusual childhood in rural South India as the daughter of missionaries. In this poem, I recall the stories my mother told me of the wild journeys from the plains of Podili up the Western Ghats to Kodai where she attended boarding school. As poet, I try to capture the audacity of youth that struggles to persist, even in the face of great suffering.   

HER STORY


They were wild trips, those journeys
up the narrow ghats that wrapped around
the mountains of my mother’s youth.

The buses had no windows, no sides,
only poles from which my mother swung,
this child with a passion for the sudden.

Her missionary mother was sure
she would be flung down the steep side
of the mountain, lost to the wildness below.

What did my mother care of that?
She was a child, full of audacity;
she loved to hear herself shriek.

And now, tethered to her dying
bones, what would my mother give
for the sureness of her youth?

So let her drape her washcloth on her head
for a crown.  Let her fling herself outward,
head first.  Oh God, let her shrieks fill the room.


(from the forthcoming chapbook Dress Her in Silk, Finishing Line Press, 2009)

For more information about Martha Andrews Donovan visit:



Photo by: Susan Wilfahrt

 

 

Click here for a list of previous Poet Showcases

Last updated: September 3, 2009

 
 
 
 
nh nh.gov | privacy policy | accessibility policy