Between

Poems
by Morgan Grayce Willow
Nodin Press, 2009

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“By turns contemplative and playful, Morgan Grayce Willow’s Between skillfully navigates the interstitial spaces we occupy throughout our lives as lovers, thinkers, and residents of a changing world.  Willow employs a fierce intelligence and a confident use of form that is both fluid and organic to the poems, at times reminiscent of Denise Levertov.  ‘The pocket of the universe is lined with words,’ she writes, and Willow’s pocket is full of words that will charm, absorb, and challenge the readers of this graceful full-length debut.”

— Kate Lynn Hibbard, author, Sleeping Upside Down

 

"Morgan Grayce Willow has followed poetry into the world's cracks and crevices, its interstices. This endeavor puts her in the company of cartographers, philosophers, biblical prophets, and painters. Out of necessity, out of balance, the language turns on an axle, eccentrically geared, well machined, modern---"clack, clack, clack" come the warning signs of arthritis, of neglect, of electricity, of waste. And the poems prove, by sheer abundance, that there's more between words and between loves and between planets than abstraction or absence, filling the reader's empty cup with a fresh wisdom, a new-found plenty."

— Scott King, author, Leftover Ordinary

"Morgan Grayce Willow explores the interaction between perception and fact, between the desire for permanence and the reality of death. In the poem, 'It Ain’t Easy,' she compares writing poems to shooting hoops; it’s either hit or miss, but you keep on shooting. In 'The Geographer: Ghazal #5,' she writes, 'Mapless, the poet watches sunrise./Path, like list, unfolds word by word.' This book is about finding direction and meaning when 'faith is not enough,' and neither map nor mathematical theory can provide the answers we crave. Only words, and the process of finding them, can help us make our way through the dark.'

— Jill Breckenridge, poet, The Gravity of Flesh

 

"The poems in Between beautifully mediate the distances between thought and feeling, the present moment and memory. In places and states of mind that can be called midway, the poems explore being a bridge of translation from spoken words to deaf audiences, passing through middle age, living between problematic neighbors, and—to paraphrase the poet—lifting the curtain between life and death. The book draws upon history and mathematics, plain speech of farmers, nature, and the language of love and love-making.

While reaching out to encounter and encompass a great range of experience, the poet maintains a center of gravity, a tan t’ien, which can be loosely translated from the Chinese as the red field or the elixir. Many of the poems’ conjured images use red, as in red-winged blackbird, Medusa’s red eyes at the window, red Firebird, red lights, and red flowers."

— Margaret Hasse, poet, Milk and Tides

 

 

 

 

 

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Between is Morgan Grayce Willow’s first full-length poetry collection.It is a quiet, layered map of shapes and spaces, love and not-love, sound and silence. Some of the poems offer witty and cultured reflections, while others are more personal.

The language is vivid and down-to-earth, and the series “Thirteen Takes On a Minnesota Night” is a tour de force of descriptive imagery. Acute observation, natural history, physics, and neighborly concern rub shoulders time and again in this diverse collection by one of Minnesota’s most consistently inspired poets.

Morgan Grayce Willow is both poet and essayist. She is the recipient of Loft McKnight and Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships, and a Witter Bynner translation project award. Her poetry chapbooks include Spinnerets, Arpeggio of Appetite, and The Maps Are Words.