Tending rises from my life on the farm and my fascination with the world at large. Informed by quietly ordinary days, these poems look into the nature of things with questions that circle the stars. I’m thrilled that the cover photo is by talented artist (and my sister) Cynthia Piper.

 

“Laura Grace Weldon employs radical empathy to enter into the hidden lives of rutabaga, cows, the neighborhood bully, and the beating heart of life itself.  Playful, curious, sensual, she aims to open the reader’s eyes and heart.”

Alison Luterman, author of See How We Almost Fly  and The Largest Possible Life.

 

“Laura Grace Weldon’s poems remind us that our world’s necessary brushes between nature and technology, human and animal, are not necessarily ones of friction. Instead, Weldon sees these moments as truly wondrous ones, available to us not only on the farm, but also in the back pocket of a window washer, swinging among the skyscrapers.”

Brad Ricca, author of American Mastodon and Super Boys.

 

“Memory, faith, and the natural world as both witness to the cycle of human life and healer to a questioning heart are at the core of this lovely and lyrical collection of poems. The weather changes, people come and go from cities and towns, babies are born, grow up and depart from their parents’ arms, but still, the countryside and its rituals sustain the people and creatures who know how to read the signs of the seasons. In these pages, Laura Grace Weldon shares those signs with us; her poems are the fruit of a wonderful harvest.”

Eleanor Lerman, author of The Sensual World Re-emerges: Poems and Mystery of Meteors.

 

“Laura Grace Weldon’s poems are concrete, allusive, and rich.”

 Diane Kendig, author of The Places We Find Ourselves.

 

“These are calming poems, set deep in the specifics of this life.”

David Budbill, author of Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse
and Happy Life.

 

Published by Aldrich Press. Order HERE.

(My friend Penny, from Dubai, suggests I share a sample. Here’s a poem from the first section, one no journal accepted although there are so few odes to root vegetables…)

Rutabaga

You darken as my knife slices

blushing at what you become.

I save your thick leaves

and purple skin

to feed the cows. 

 

A peasant guest at any meal

you agree to hide in fragrant stew

or gleam nakedly

in butter and chives.

 

Though your seeds are tiny

you grow with fierce will

grateful for poor soil and dry days,

heave up from the ground

under sheltering stalks

to sweeten with the frost.

 

Tonight we take you into our bodies

as if we do you a favor—

letting your molecules

become a higher being,

one that knows music and art.

 

But you share with us

what makes you a rutabaga.

Through you we eat sunlight,

taste the soil’s clamoring mysteries,

gain your seed’s perfect might. 

Laura Grace Weldon