River Country

ISBN:

978-1- 60461- 003- 4

TITLE: River Country Light. Paperback.

AUTHOR: Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda

PRICE: $14.99

COVER PHOTOGRAPH:

"The Provider, Osprey, Tidewater, Virginia" by Archie Fripp

 

Endorsements

“Graceful and honest in its ‘need to leave something nourishing behind,’ River Country showcases Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s precise eye, keen ear, and fertile imagination. Nothing in the natural world is lost in this carefully made volume, each poem conveying a ‘translucent, pensive truth.’”
Claudia Emerson

“River Country captures the setting of Tidewater Virginia, all the way to the Bay, with its well-measured, sonorous words.  This book contains a life list of birds, seen in context, from cardinals fretting at a backyard feeder . . . to the once threatened osprey that ‘dives to kill.’  Unflinching in her observations and meditations while deeply empathetic with the natural world, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda writes from an awareness of our human, mostly sorry, impact on land, waters, and creatures, even as she sings every shred of life she sees.” 
CATHRYN HANKLA

“From Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s rich language and agile imagination spring metaphors that spin the straw of observation into the gold of true vision.  In her poems, the trees, birds, fish have lives and voices of their own through which the world speaks, making a reader’s inner world resonate with the ever more precarious outer world of nature.”

JANE GENTRY

“Paul Valéry wrote: ‘a work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we've been looking at.’  Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda's River Country accomplishes just that in lines laid down like paint on the page.”

MARIE HARRIS

Dragon Run  

Knee-deep in the Dragon, I lean in

to feel the wilderness.

The brisk call of dawn splashes

against ash and gum.  Sassy,

this liquid sun pursuing a cypress,

its roots lifted from the swamp

like stubby knees.  Stooping, with the bowl

of my hands, I draw from the depths

muddied snails, clams, a leech snaking

palustrine waters and squirming as I fish.

Careful not to tear pickerel weeds

or cattails, I let pliant grasses braid

the pristine path, nibble my manmade boots,

gurgling through this sibilant stream,

swishing like a reptile.  The windless

air sliced, I search loblollies,

spy a bald eagle lifting off.  Chiseled bones

float by.  Opiate: the thrall.  I teeter,

fall.  Against my jaw a damselfly’s flutter.

Like a stunned doe, I flail.  The taste

of sediment numbs my senses.  I breathe in

these wetlands like a wild iris.

©2008 by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, all rights reserved