The Women’s National Book Association had our board meeting on Sunday at poet and novelist Mary Mackey’s home. Wikipedia has this to say about Mackey:
Mary Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and thirteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, three sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mackey
Mary received her BA from Harvard and a PhD from the University of Michigan. She’s been a professor of English since 1972. The following poem is from Travelers With No Ticket Home (Marsh Hawk Press 2014) ©Mary Mackey,
Walking toward the Largo do Machado
when the smell of jasmine
flows through the streets of Catete like a warm fog
when the scent is so liquid you can
breathe it in get drunk and stagger
I think of all the years I have loved you
and all the years I will go on loving you
I think of how we protect each other from pain and betrayal
how each night we wrap ourselves around each other
and peace floats above our bed like a canopy of white petals
The description on Amazon: In this stunning new collection, Mackey offers her readers fifty-eight intensely lyrical poems written with the same skill and passion that made her previous collection Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Complex yet entirely accessible, the poems in Travelers With No Ticket Home form a visionary meditation on nature, childhood, the destruction of the rain forest of the Amazon, and the real and psychological landscape of travel. Taking us from a small farm in Western Kentucky to the jungles of Brazil, Mackey touches on the broader human feelings of wonder, displacement, grief, love, and love’s endless complications. Here too, for the first time, readers will find Mackey’s complete Karma Sutra of Kindness, a series of seven love poems written over the last thirty years.
