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Duet in the Little Blue Church
In this impressive volume poet Sharon Chmielarz had drawn from a lifetime of work—four decades and fourteen books in all—to present a representative selection of her wide-ranging poetic interests and imagination. Early poems draw their imagery from working-class family life—a focus that soon expanded to include the lives of particular women, daughter/father relationships, widowhood, and other more curious and metaphysical themes. Her poems are often related in a wry and enigmatic conversational style that bears comparison to such modern Polish masters as Szymborska and Miłosz. The European element is strong, extending from the streets of Warsaw to the impressions of Nannerl Mozart in Paris, but so is the immigrant experience of the Great Plains—the author was born and raised in South Dakota. In a central section titled “On the Prairie,” Chmielarz has chosen and combined poems from three of her books to evoke both the feel and the sometimes grueling history of those new arrivals who followed the trails west.
Sharon Chmielarz was born and raised in Mobridge, South Dakota, but has spent her adult life in Minnesota. Her first two books, Different Arrangements and But I Won’t Go Out in a Boat were awarded Minnesota Voices Prizes. Her book The Other Mozart, a biography in poetry, was made into an opera. Her collections Visibility: Ten Miles and Speaking in Riddles were finalists for the 2015 and 2021 Midwest Book Awards. little eternities was a finalist for the Ben Franklin Award. Calling and The Widow’s House were finalists for the Next Generation Indie Books Awards. The latter, along with The J Horoscope, were named by Kirkus Reviews in the Best Books of 2016 and 2019.
Chmielarz’s work has been a finalist in the National Poetry Series, and her poems have been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. They have been featured on American Life in Poetry, and individual poems have been translated into French and Polish. She’s the recipient of a Jane Kenyon Award from The Water~Stone Review. Her poems have been published in The Notre Dame Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Hudson Review, The North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Commonweal, Salmagundi, Margie, Salmagundi, The Seneca Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, CutBank, and in Nodin Press’s 2015 poetry anthology.
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When I Was Young and Old
As the title suggests, Freya Manfred’s new collection of poetry and prose explores those evocative yet often illusive connections between experience, memory, and emotion. “I want to laugh a liquid laugh,” she writes at one point, “every gurgling morsel of me , cascading like water over singing stones...” Some of the lyrics—“In a Dream My Friend Sails Toward Me,” for example—bring to mind the young Yeats, with their unabashedly romantic and fanciful imagery. Others deal with day-to-day events—planting a tree, eating dinner with her sons, swimming in the dark—from which a deeper resonance gradually emerges. The poet sometimes questions herself, finds herself briefly unmoored and filled with a nameless yearning that crystallizes in images of the nature that surrounds her or of loved ones, present or vividly remembered. The prose pieces counterbalance the poetic reflections, offering memories of childhoods games and the anxious and exciting campus parties of young adulthood. This panoply of glimpses into a life richly lived yet also filled with longing unfolds with the simplicity and imaginative concreteness of a true master.
Freya Manfred is a longtime Midwesterner who has lived on both coasts. She attended Macalester College and Stanford University, and has received a Radcliffe Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Her seventh collection, Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared in more than a hundred reviews and magazines and more than fifty anthologies. Her memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Award. Her more recent memoir is Raising Twins: A True Life Adventure. She lives with her husband, screenwriter Thomas Pope, in Stillwater, Minnesota. Their sons, visual artists Bly Pope and Rowan Pope, have illustrated many of her books. Additional information is available on Freya’s website at www. freyamanfredwriter.com.
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World Enough and Time
This volume contains new poems along with a retrospective look at Norita Dittberner-Jax’s long career as a poet. The themes and images vary, as have the phases of her personal life, though an underlying continuum of family and community connections is ever-present. Individual poems often seem to be working to establish a coherent shape, a balance, a beauty, in the midst of challenging and sometimes dreadful experiences, including her beloved husband’s last years with ALS and her own cancer diagnosis. Several recent poems offer naked descriptions of dealing with solitude and unearthing the sanctity of quotidian events and seemingly vacant hours. From first to last, the poet remains inspired by the comfort and beauty of the natural world and grateful for the rich life she’s lived, her love of art, childhood memories, time spent in the classroom and traveling abroad, and the liveliness of the city. Wistfulness, joy, outrage, desperation, and reverence: it’s all here, flowing with the lyrical pulse of a Psalm.
Norita Dittberner-Jax was born and raised in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, the sixth of seven children. She was educated in parochial schools and graduated from the (then) College of Saint Catherine. She started writing when her children were young, just as the Twin Cities area was becoming a center for creative writing with the emergence of the Loft. She taught English in the public schools of Saint Paul, and creative writing for the Writers-in-the Schools Program and at the Perpich Center for the Arts. Her second marriage, to Eugene Jax, brought international travel and a great interest in art. In retirement from teaching, she returned to academic life, earning an MFA in poetry from Hamline University. Norita is one of the poetry editors for Red Bird Chapbooks.
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