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To Read the poems
of Rita Quillen is to read a writer attentive to the natural world, as
seen in poems such as "The Good Life," where "Tobacco
Teepees/ stand desolate/ after the massacre" and "Weary
sunflowers/ look like women in yellow bonnets/ nodding in the last hot
dose/ of August sun." She is also a poet adept at both free verse
and complex verse forms such as the pantoum; a writer capable of
adopting a convincing persona, as in her series of "Mad Farmer’s
Wife" poems. Ultimately, however, the new and selected poems in Her
Secret Dream reveal an author whose major focus is the complex
connections of family, connections that transcend even death. An old
Chinese maxim argues that no one is truly dead until he or she is
forgotten. Many of the poems in this book are a fierce refusal to
forget, an acknowledgement of the continuing influence of the dead on
living. "Skeleton Truth," for instance, has the narrator
realizing she now possesses "my mother’s hands." A similar
connection is made in "Apple Butter," remembering a shared
moment of mother and daughter canning together. In "My Grandfather
Photographs His Son, 1937," the poem concludes with the speaker
noting that father, grandfather, and speaker are "All three of us
one/ trinity of regret." I have admired Rita Quillen’s poetry for
years, and this collection will have an honored place on my bookshelf
beside volumes by Jeff Daniel Marion, Kay Byer, Robert Morgan, and Fred
Chappell. It is my hope that Her Secret Dream will find a
well-deserved place on many, many bookshelves. --- Ron Rash
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