In her new collection, Katherine Edgren’s aim is to love what changes, and she achieves it delightfully. Though well aware of our time’s tensions, she is keeping out the noise of grief and pain for now, casting an affectionate eye on nature and deploying her gift for fresh, often humorous metaphor, as in Leg Brace, where-laid up with a broken leg-she likens her captor in turn to a cocoon, a black python, a black bra, a darkroom, and a six-legged octopus. Any reader stuck indoors will especially enjoy her vibrant, outdoorsy scenes-a breath of summer, a true vacation. Formalist readers will relish her recent forays into rhyme and near-rhyme.
Lynn D. Gilbert, associate editor of the journal Third Wednesday and a
founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, is one of four poets
in Four Shields of Power (Plain View Press) and has appeared in various
print and online journals.
Katherine Edgren turns moments of time in her hands, examines them with intelligence, then conveys her insights with language that leaves the reader wanting to read the next poem in this varied collection. Her poems delve into experiences with luminosity and lyricism. Katherine’s poetic voice is mature, musical and deeply perceptive. She is at her best with nature but demonstrates that she can handle any subject with sensitivity and craft.
David Jibson, Editor of Third Wednesday Magazine
Using a metaphysical approach, Katherine Edgren explores realities through nature and human activities. Her emphasis on the outdoors creates a sensuous world clarified by sharp focus on the pictures she paints. She maintains her pinpoint observations while managing to weave in an enticing streak of husband-love. These poems accomplish what poetry readers look for: finding new depths to the meaning of rain, the universes found in a lake, how walking a dog leads to ineffable beauty, the idealization of a quiet morning.
After a career of teaching overseas, Laurence W. Thomas lectured on poetry in
Arkansas, published books of poetry, fiction, humor, and creative non-fiction, and
founded the literary arts journal, Third Wednesday in 2007, where he is
now editor emeritus.
