Welsh Woman Wandering and Other Poems

By Susan Ellen Mesinai

Subjects: Poetry
Imprint: Distribution Partners
Paperback : 9781930337220, 89 pages, August 2010

Table of contents

Early Songs of Experience
(1970–72)

Mrs. Walters
Willimae
Epilogue
History & The Watchman
Against Moon
What Is Desire?
Yellow Gold
Death in Taos
Kali’s Garden
Changes
Wind Tree
You
Israel
(1973–1984)

Sojourning
Jacob Between Worlds
Jacob On Women
Noah’s Dream Before Yom Kippur
Phantoms
Rivkah, The Spring Before the War
Rivkah the Whore, The Spring After
Cain’s Plow: The Downside of War
Tzippi After the Maalot Massacre
Qumran
It’s Snowing, Rav Nachman
Kruvim
Strange Places
(1984–1988)

Crossing the Realm of Riches
Bardo
Highway Man Riding
Yellow Leaves
Nanny
November 1988
The Gulag
(1991–1993)

Portrait of a Dissident
Bark
Raoul Listening
Songs of Now
(1994–Present)

The Color of Listening
Sea Change
Hamadoun’s Lament
Welsh Woman Wandering

Description

Scholar in Comparative Religion and co-author of Shlomo's Stories (Jason Arson), Mesinai was chosen one of Columbia University's 250 'greatest graduates' for her search for Raoul Wallenberg and other foreign prisoners who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag after World War II. Although she has published occasionally in New York, San Francisco, and Japan—this is her first book of poetry.

"Susan Mesinai's poems are spiritual, inquisitive, and generous—an alchemy of language. With imagistic lines and surprising off-rhymes, their many cadenced voices range from Raoul Wallenberg's isolation cell to Jacob's ladder-totem-pole; Kali's broad sweeping grounds to a mother's mother's healing well; a daughter who "…plants her feet on mine … laughing backwards" to a wife's full moon face, "braver than any war. " I'm grateful for these new connections to this bright, agile world of constantly renewing relationships. " –Christianne Balk, Author of Bindweed and Desiring Flight

"Susan Mesinai, activist, poet, moral conscience, sends dispatches from a spiritual battlefront…lyrical, personal, fiercely honest, an American Akhmatova, Mesinai bears witness to the madness of her time, and to hard-won moments of sanity and hope in this incandescent collection of poems. " –Marcus Boon, York University, Author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs