The White Hydrangeas

By Lawrence O'Brien

Unlike many modern poets who offer us what are really prosaic essays arranged into stanzas, Larry O'Brien is a poet of rhythm and sound-of language which we recognize immediately as poetry. In his responses to the events and sights of everyday life, he sees-and helps us better see and experience-the beauty of the eternal as it is revealed in the ordinary, whence the title of the book: "White Hydrangeas"; for there is in his poetry a Wordsworthian sense of the presence of "The Other" in our lives; but without Wordsworth's frantic insistence on pointing it out, or trying to define it. He makes us simply experience the feeling that it is there. O'Brien frequently draws his images from his New England roots: he smells "the scent of a dying cornfield," or sees "maple leaves litter the ground / like flakes of fire fallen from heaven"; and yet he can be suddenly contemporary, using images drawn not from the ancient myths, but from our own modern myths, which we call movies: someone is "dragged down by blue / guilt deep in the belly of Monstro"; a friend's stepmother has a "look like Cruela de Vill," or we wait "for Bette Davis / to come storming in brandishing a chrome plated / revolver, eyes wide and hot with jealousy. Above all, this is the poetry of experience-the experience of Life as it is lived-Life with a capital L. -Frank Salvidio (Assoc. Prof. of English {ret.} Westfield State University), author of Between Troy& Florence, Inventing Love, Vita Nuova (trans.) Inferno (trans.) The second poem in Lawrence O'Brien's new poetry collection, The White Hydrangeas, begins thus: Nostalgia/is a chronic condition/.... And so it can be, and yet I would add that, for O'Brien, nostalgia is both vibrant and sublime, a "condition" he nurtures in his poems with love, honor ancommemoration. These poems are devoted to memory, to stories of time, places, people and events that come alive in crisp, authentic detail O'Brien's poems, rooted in southern New England, exquisitely braid music, family, the Latin Mass, the seasons and nature into a praise song for our earth and its mysterious, beloved creations. -Becky Dennison Sakellariou's chapbook, The Importance of Bone, won first prize from Blue Light Press, San Francisco, in 2005, and Hobblebush Books in New Hampshire recently published her first full-length book,Earth Listening.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615920608
• ISBN13: 9780615920603
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 110 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"