What You Saw and Still Remember \ Judith Waller Carroll

poems by

Judith Waller Carroll

ISBN: 978-1-59948-646-8, 72 pages, $14

Projected Release Date: November, 2017

Judith Waller Carroll is the author of The Consolation of Roses, winner of the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Prize, and Walking in Early September (Finishing Line Press).  Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Awards include the 2010 Carducci Poetry Prize from Tallahassee Writers’ Association. She lives in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas with her husband, the novelist Jerry Jay Carroll.

Judith Waller Carroll is a perceptive observer of both the human and nonhuman worlds. She is also a master of the brief lyric poem. Her precise images take hold and settle until the poem’s close, when they stab and sizzle. What You Saw and Still Remember could be labeled poetry of place, as long as places within the human heart are included. Carroll’s finely wrought poems seize our own hearts and do not let go. –Andrea Hollander, author of Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012

This book reads like the comfort of a soft rain and then the sun breaking out after. Carroll’s poems are filled with keen observations of everyday nature and the intricacies of human relationships. They remind their audience, gently, to savor the minutia of each day. Contemplative and intimate, this work, like all good poetry, will call the reader to slow down, to read again. –Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

Dimensions of the Heart

A blue whale’s heart
is the size of a male gorilla,
but human hearts are measured
in more fanciful terms:
as big as Texas, hard as stone.
Soft. Sinking. Restless.

My own fickle heart
craves solitude in a crowd,
company when I’m alone.

All those years by the ocean
and it only wanted mountains,
the smell of blue spruce.
Now it yearns for salt spray and sea weed.
A mild winter. Fresh crab.

Or maybe those whispers of longing
really come from the soul—
that immeasurable space
somewhere between the mind,
with its reason and logic,
and the hollow muscular organ
pumping blood through the body,
oxygen to the brain.

My Father’s Blue Sweater

He hasn’t been alive for over twenty years
but suddenly, here he is in this room,
smelling of Marlboros and mints,
wearing that blue cardigan,
faded and soft, slightly frayed at the cuffs,
the one I brought home after his funeral
and wore for weeks without washing,
not wanting to lose the scent.
He is reeled back on his heels
reciting Emerson by heart,
dark eyes wide, unruly eyebrows raised,
long fingers outstretched, smoothing the air.

What You Saw and Still Remember

Another spring hurtles by in a blur of green,
seasons sprinting past each other
as quickly as your life
will pass before you at the end,

flashes of your son’s first smile,
your daughter’s head crowning,
all the people you have ever loved,
what you saw and still remember.

The Maasai Mara at sunset. The sway
of long grass. A lion in slow motion.
The wildebeest’s trembling mouth,
its last breath.