Dale writes out of experience, out of knowing and not knowing, out of adversity, sorrow, joy, and amazement. The richness of these poems, written over a span of 54 years, comes from both their original subject matter and the maturation that can be found in poems such as "Forty Years of Love" and "Escape: Spring, 1926" that have been revised over decades. Many of the poems in this collection reveal a mind that is continually revisiting earlier assumptions. Social justice, grief, loss, transmutation-Dale finds wisdom in a nail salon, baseball, a sweet dog. She sees the difference between the things that cannot be improved on this simmering blue planet and those that can be made acceptable through personal perspective.
In these poems, time changes everything: place, relationships, even the delight once found in a ripe peach. Time also offers the possibility of transcendence over death in the metaphor of "Leavening" and a reframing of aging, offering the option that to be old is to be liminal, able to become anything.
In "She Ponders Questions of Quantum Physics," Dales writes, Meaning remains the strange attractor of my life. Meaning and maturity are seamlessly fused in this wise and retrospective take on being here, now, and still able to become. -Deborah Fries is a prize-winning poet, editor, and artist.
In language as beautiful and unadorned as clothes on a line under a Kansas sky, Kathleen A Dale includes in this rich collection old and new poems that speak to each other-poems of her Kansas girlhood's griefs and wonders, her studies of music and poetry, her family, and her teaching life. I will return and return to the promontory of time these poems of the beautiful and terrible world take us to. -Martha Bergland is an award-winning author who has written about people who interact deeply with the natural world.
