What Just Happened: Stories in Verse

What Just Happened is a poetic chronicle of a life richly lived. -Keith Cushman, author of D. H. Lawrence at Work.

What Just Happened, Barbara Baillet Moran’s first collection of poetry and stories in verse, offers a flavorful blend of tales that reveal a well-seasoned life.

Beginning during World War II and winding through arduous decades to the present day, Moran recalls images from an observant childhood and adolescent awakenings. Her recollections about marriage and motherhood are provocative and comic, as are memories of the many unique individuals she met during a quarter-century of entertaining guests on two university campuses.

Moran plays with language-puns, rhymes, alliteration, and invented words. A chapter called Not Just About the Food is a banquet of responses to food: the poetic essence of Soup, seductive nature of the orange, nobility of the lemon, tang of Moroccan sumac, and tart joys of cranberries. The strenuosity, over many years, of preparing 47,000 meals-with relish!

Wry humor enlivens inauspicious events. Mending and fending-strangers intrude, rambunctious children bristle with mischief, spousal wit converts vexation into vaudeville.

By no means are the stories all cheerful. The grave plight of humans is accompanied by tales of courage: a young friend pilots helicopter rescue missions in Afghanistan, children flee burning villages in Sudan, an elderly waitress makes her way through the day.Poignant reflections in later life bring this robust collection to a serene and satisfying conclusion.