Poetry for Moms

Sometimes in my life as a mother, where days go by too quickly with too little done, and I wash too much laundry, and change too many really dirty diapers; or on those days where by a hair I keep my cool through a day when the kids are particularly crabby, but am fried after, literally spent from the effort, I need really great literature. I need classics like Homer, or an excellently emplotted novel with six expertly drawn points of view. I need something that lifts me out of the day-to-day tedium of it all and reminds me of the grandest visions of life. This keeps my head above the parenting waters when I need it.

On other days, I need writing that is less grand. I've never been a writing snob. Sometimes it's Henry James you need. Sometimes it's the latest issue of Real Simple, or last winter's Fine Gardening, with essays on how to crate a moss garden, landscape trees, or create a cutting garden. There are days when I need literature that recalls the world outside the four walls of my home and the two bodies of my children, and there are days when what I want is something that reflects my experiences of being a mother and a woman. In these times. Now.

A few weeks back, writer and poet Jayne Jaudon Ferrer sent me her new book of poems, called She of the Rib: Women Unwrapped. Her website is one of those small treasures of the internet. Today when I clicked over, the opening paragraph was about whimsy, and here's what she had to say:
The book contains some poems in a similar vein, like her Ode to Friday: O perfect day!/O perfectg day!/A day that dawns so fair!/O blessed day at end of which/One can let down their hair. That's along side more serious reflections on turning forty, death and loss (They were going to grow old together, but, suddenly, one is gone and the other is alone.)

What touched me is the way she's got the big right in there with the small, until you can't really tell the difference. The small and simple pleasures of life are worthy of words, worthy of being marked in their passing, too. Jayne calls it "reality poetry," and I'm happy to introduce it here.