
From the Publisher:
The poems in Crone’s Wines often unlock the memories at the fringes of consciousness, making them come alive, or reflect on the mysterious and unspoken, casting them into the realm of the familiar. With a mix of formal and free-verse poems, Crone’s Wines is wide-ranging in style and scope: its many preoccupations include solitude, nature, family, love, even the lightheartedness of cat poems, and aging and death—as befits the “late poems” subtitle, informed by the poet’s age. There is a sense of the spiritual and meditative in the universal poems, and a fierce openness in the poems of personal relationship, often intimate in their recollections. This a rewarding collection with a lifetime of memories and experience, delivered with wit and wisdom.
ABOUT MAGGIE FINCH’S POETRY
Margaret Rockwell Finch’s moving lyrics are passionate and lightly elegiac by turns. They speak unabashedly about desire and the human heart, but without the taints of sensationalism or sentimentality. Speak, however, is not the right word; given the delicately turned musicality of these poems, the mot juste must be sing.
—David Yezzi
Haunted, burnished passion echoes through these deft and beautifully alert lyrics. Margaret Rockwell Finch uses poetry’s traditional means to ends that are purely her own. From time’s quarrels, she has fashioned poems that resonate with poetry’s timelessness.
—Baron Wormser
Like the best of the chain of passionate women poets to which she belongs, Margaret Rockwell Finch is skilled in the perfectly torqued line, angled to pull power straight from the personal and often the collective unconscious. So many of these poetic crystals, forged with feeling and dignity out of the heart of experience, shine with the clarity of honesty and the strength of skillful craft. I am honored to count this poet as my literal and literary foremother.
—Annie Finch
Sample Poems
VOICES OVER WATER
Voices of strangers coming over water
However haunting, do not, cannot stay:
Even though understood, the moving water
Carries the words of strangers, lost, away.
Voices that love us coming over water,
However faint and far, however fleet,
Bring a bright singing over lovely water;
Words laid on the heart, that help it beat.
Voices we loved over remembered water
However gone, echo like childhood song
Whispering down the body’s living water
Where words they told us, murmur in us, lifelong.
THE FAMILIAR
Curving the cat
In heap of happy
As days gone by,
Curled baby in belly—
Lacking new love
(Human for human)
You’ll say—but I
(Wistful old woman)—
Grateful and glad
For fortune of fur
Changing a sigh
To pureness of purr.
THREE MOTHERS
I lay inside my darling mother
Warm embraced the sun of her womb,
Content to hear the seed of her singing
And thread my loom.
I lie inside my darling Mother
Here where Her shuttle voices move,
Content to sing the web of our weaving
And learn Her love.
I’ll lie inside my darling Mother
Deep and deep when the leaves fall—
Content to sleep in that silent music
And wait Her call.