Do We Ever Stay?

By Susan Hunter

In these poems of remembrance, Susan Hunter steadfastly names her most vital connections - to ancestors and to family, to places that provided orientation, to friends, and to the spirits in nature. What consoles here may also trigger a shiver of assessment. When she asks the world around her to "keep my universe close," she is asking us to abide with her in that tremulous space.

-Ron Slate, author, Joy Ride

In Susan Hunter's Do We Ever Stay? the sea and the past are always close at hand, even if only in dreams. Those two elements, water and ether, have stories to tell, insights to offer and sometimes ghosts who need comfort, conversation or confrontation. Though there are excursions into Pennsylvania's hills, Tucson's desert, and further afield, these poems are mostly set against New England's landscape and history. Hunter incises the soft belly of New England as home, hearth, and kin-driven, and reveals that every place and person has its singular wild interior. The poem "Dominoes" reminds the reader that technicolor is not an antidote to grief's grays.

At the other end of the spectrum are the poems of new generations that remind the reader that the future arrives without invitation but often with delight. The ghosts who come and go, the tides that swell and ebb, even the ekphrastic reverie over a long dead pianist's last music, all become doors into a world familiar but also new. In "Boston," the final poem in the book, we accept that "there will] be hills to climb" and we are willing to look back and ask that world, "Do you remember me?"

-Miriam O'Neal, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1639809627
• ISBN13: 9781639809622
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Kelsay Books