Peggy's New Poetry Chapbooks

Peggy's New Poetry Chapbooks

I’m the guy who sharpens her number two pencil. Every morning, without fail Peggy Aylsworth, now in her 96th year, writes a poem in her composition notebook. And that’s not the only reason I married her.

We don’t travel anymore. Ambulation has its challenges but her spirit is undiminished. The poems are extensions of her perceptions and that vast country within called the imagination.

Her subjects range from trees, real and imagined, blossomed plants and feathered creatures at our breakfast window to an orange cap on the head of a dog-walker to an article about tragedy in South Sudan. All of these might find their way into one poem. She doesn’t linger to milk a metaphor. She darts, like a hummingbird, having distilled just enough from a single image to create a thread.

Peggy's poetry is an amazing web of connectivity. A collage of disparate notations. A quiet yet rhapsodic orchestration of what her senses register and her mind intuits. She is able to transform the largely un-noticed passing parade into her own language we call, Aylsworthian.

The result is much more than a montage of imagery. Through the alchemy of her poetics and a finely tuned sensibility Peggy finds veins of emotional universality in what seem unremarkable.

Wisdom is one of those words devoutly to be avoided yet the pile of years does confer at least an amplitude of vision which she manages to bring to the page. There is a celebration of the elemental. Her poems seem to extract an affirmation even from the dread and daily defamations we have come to accept as admissible in public discourse. Peggy’s poetry suggests not only the yes from yesterday but that a substance within us shall prevail. 

The above was written by me a couple of years ago. She's now two years younger. (Every birthday, I subtract a year)

Two chapbooks of her poetry have been in the works for a while and are soon to be released. One, Better In The Dark, takes as her subject about thirty films seen over the past decades. Most of them are challenging to the sensibility of an American audience. She sees through the opacity and reconfigures the narrative in her uniquely slanted way. The result is not a plot summary but the essence of the movie into another art form. Actually this book is already available from Amazon. 

The second, Two Is A Sacred Number, is a collection of love poetry written to, of all people, me. What can I say? Of course, they are wonderful and surely more meaningful to me but I'm happy to share. In a sense all Peggy's poems are love letters to the world. Most of these are part of our exchange of poems on special occasions. Mine tend to be too referential to particular names and places. Almost thirty-five years ago we were washed ashore to set sail at first light, not as Ulysses or Ahab but ancient mariners rowing to Eden, oar to oar. This book is in the final stages and will be listed on Amazon in the next couple of weeks.