Linda Parsons has written a book we sorely need-lyric meditations composed with an impeccable ear, explorations of family love and loss, flowering and decline, sunderings and difficult reunion. Combining sure-handed verse with prose poems of drastic intensity, Valediction reminds us the world is a cutting garden worthy of relentless tending and care. These hard-won poems are the harvest of a talent in high season.-Bobby C. Rogers, author of Shift Work and Paper Anniversary For the poet, a garden is world enough. The bee, the singed leaf, the needful dirt, the worm. The tiger lily, fireworks. The moss, its slug. We may enter our gardens thinking we will control the earth, curate it, but we walk out realizing that we're just another bug with song. (Thank God.) In Valediction the master Tennessean poet Linda Parsons gives us not just her song but the whole oratorio-out from the center of her Knoxville yard she broadcasts the glory of her evening hour, joining in with cicadas and hawks, figs and frost, black widows, and all the ghosts of her ascendants living inside her, the perfect cacophony of love. This book is transcendent.-Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and A Winter Breviary
"After the long virus winter, how can I be / anything but sun-warm skin and bone / down to my brightening folds, / down to the naked earth"? These lines highlight the many acts of transfiguration found inside this excellent collection by Linda Parsons. Steeped within the natural world, the poems explore the "mired muddy lake bottom of childhood" and weave throughout the collection a series titled "visitations" in which memories and the deceased meld into the present. The poems here are joyful, but it's a joy that comes hard-earned and clear-eyed. Be they about swimming off the coast of Cuba, reminiscing about the loss of a friend while sledding, or simply tending to the backyard garden, these poems do what all great poems do-they risk wonder despite loss. As Parsons writes in "October Foot Washing" "For what is the earth but a tangled bouquet / lit to its core, what am I but a conduit / of ions." Valediction, which is the act of saying farewell, pulses with lyrical energy. This collection showcases a poet whose talents, insights, and rhythms are at their height.-Charlotte Pence, author of Code