Banshees

By Eileen P. Kennedy

This premier volume explores the boundaries of aging, death, trauma, and illness, yet brings us universal questions we need answered. Banshees is a "voice in the morning air directing supplications upward from the mausoleum of the throat.""Like the mythological banshees of the book's title, Eileen P. Kennedy's poems arrive as messengers, for they are passionate, fierce, and insistent about what they've witnessed. And although much of this collection carries an elegiac tone, the poet also hears 'ancient laughter/between the lines.' These contrasts comprise a universe that feels both very old and simultaneously of our present, and reflects timeless truths and experiences such as love and death and longing." --Holly Wren Spaulding Author of Pilgrim and The Grass Impossibly"Eileen P. Kennedy's poetry is suffused with images of aging and death. In 'Psalm of the Writer,' the writer suggests 'supplications upward from the mausoleum of the throat,' a beautiful image suggesting the pathos of human yearning for connection, for communication, for eternal life amidst separation and loss. In 'Muerte,' three lines that speak bluntly, matter-of-factly of death: 'Gone sudden and swift/I recall now head askew/eyes expectant fierce.' In 19 brief poems, Kennedy touches on all the big topics: friendship, love, aging, death, religion, politics, and poetry itself. 'I meet you in what I write,' she says in 'Elegy for the Poet.' We meet ourselves in what she writes." --Preston M. Browning, Jr. Associate Professor Emeritus of English University of Illinois at Chicago Director, Wellspring House

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692297049
• ISBN13: 9780692297049
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Flutter Press
• Length: 24 Pages
• Weight: 0.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"
• Grade Range: All grades