SPIRIT POND AND OTHER MAINE POEMS
By Liz Moser
66 pp.
Goose River Press. $8.95.

Reviewed by Jim Walker

This versatile collection of verse is by a poet who has already appeared in Wolf Moon Press Journal’s pages, and it is a pleasure to include a review of her work in our magazine. The poems are divided into five undesignated groupings.

The first poem, “Spirit Pond,” which gives the collection its name, is about the sea, which, in Moser’s mind, is her spirit pond.

When I am most at peace, I’m by a dam in Maine.
My spirit’s with the ebb and flow into a tidal pond….

Later, she describes how

Twice a day the water
surges in and out
replenishing both pond and ocean…

And finally telling us that

Peace is when I’m lying in the marshgrass
by the pond, hearing wave song, smelling seaweed…


A number of poems in this collection have to do with Moser’s close and intimate reflections on observed nature. This would seem to be true of all of the poems in the first section of the book.

Section two is more about people, making comment on the role of grandparenting, and, in particular, speaking of her granddaughter Naomi, at age thirteen, whom she describes:

She is strong, yet I’ve seen tears.
She can be hurt.
She accepts help when it’s offered, and
also knows how to comfort others.

This poem about her granddaughter and "Spirit Pond"  summarize the two main themes of Moser’s work. She writes about natural things and how they feed her existence. She also writes about people—about granddaughter Naomi and an anonymous best friend and how Moser is startled by the visit of her friend’s sister. She calls this poem “Mirage,” and the sister reminds Moser of her friend, who died painfully:

Her presence brought me to
the day I said goodbye.
I had accepted
emptiness, but didn’t realize
the wound is still
so raw.

There is always a tension in these poems, an incomplete resolution that gives a kind of tightness to the verse. And this reviewer would like to add that the entire collection becomes more meaningful and important the more often one reads and rereads, which is what one should always do with a volume of poems. Why else has the writer worked so hard to distill and make more perfect a word order from sentences that might otherwise have been more mundane prose?

In the autobiographical note, Moser explains that she divides her time between a (rural) Maine and an (urban?) Maryland. The thrust of these poems is summed up in these lines from the final poem in this volume:

I need to focus on the gulls,
their forsaken cry,
wings slow-motioning above me,
heads nodding,
searching, searching
for a space to rest among the waves…

 

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2008 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines