poems by

Carolyn Gelland

Author’s Choice Chapbook Series

Poetry chapbook, 96 pages, $11 cover price

ISBN: 978-1-59948-438-9

Release date: September, 10 2013.

Carolyn Gelland grew up in Europe and in New York City, where she worked as a translator and directed a small art gallery. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals. She and her husband, poet Kenneth Frost, moved to rural Maine to focus on writing poems. Her first collection, Four-Alarm House, was also published by Main Street Rag.

At the outset of this collection Carolyn Gelland evokes a primordial sense of awareness of the human condition and perhaps an archetypal image of man alone before the universe as her first poem states, “Sometimes the black tar / sky descends on me / and I wish to burn again, // a knee dancing / around a fire and a mound.” As such, in Dream-Shuttle Gelland examines the world around her as she searches for relevance and meaning through her meditative responses to the past and her thoughtful observations of the present. She delights in nature and simple things like a summer wind that “plays / with a yellow / curtain…” and peacocks “calling / in their / rusty voices.” Yet, she can startle the reader as well with a nuclear explosion that “melts eyeballs, / explodes / in flung bodies,” or recall a Viking ship with its rows of oarsmen. We wander through history and back through these well-crafted poems that weave mythology, history, art, and the natural world with a dream world that leaves us wanting to read these poems again and again.  This is a profound and powerful second collection of poetry by Carolyn Gelland.

–Jonathan K. Rice

HIGH NOON

drunk on spices
crying for sunset,
swings the watch-chain
of its gold tail
across the sky,
slides manias
into my brain
while tom-toms
stutter
through the covered
jungle of my heart,
alarming high
dreamland
to its regime
of accidents.

NORTH WIND BLOWING

This is where grandmother,
her body fat with magic,
stopped the north wind blowing.

She climbed into the wind
like it was a tree,
her breath one big pump inside her,
and the leaves climbed
stairways through the air.

She rode around with the wind all day,
a wild bird on his shoulder,
leaves and vines not letting
one another go.

Wind, wind, silent
in the way of howling dogs,
blowing in the blue
head of the sky,
empty your buckets
full of Sundays,
shake down a river of apples
so baby’s cradle can fall.

The crackling hangs there
in the quiet
chanting of the air.
Darkness deepens into crows.

HOSPITAL

The mutilated hum,
their keepers hum
in all the caves and sewer pipes
under the world.

Their broken strings of vocal chords
whine like whipped
antennae
down the night halls.

No visitor
comes from the stars,
though the witches have all
been hanged.

I once saw
my mother’s ghost
in the cleft
palate between two lives.

It takes an empty face
to roller skate through them.