This Shaky Earth

Linda Parsons Marion�??s fourth poetry collection, This Shaky Earth, straddles time, family divisions and legacies, and the regions of her native Tennessee. From her grandmother�??s indwelling kitchen and raggedy garden plot to now being a grandmother and gardener herself, she cultivates the lessons and language of the past in her own backyard. Marion�??s poems are leavened with a hunger to understand the upheavals of childhood and its growing pains, to be fed full to bursting on life�??s vegetable immensity, to face the passing seasons with grace, where all she knows of this black-eyed earth is perishing even as it flowers. Old Words The old words you polish and peel, choice fruit for my stirred ruminations: ballpeen and tenpenny hammered anew, cotoneaster spreadeagle by the wayside. I say them with you and after you, honeydew on the tongue, a tad sigoglin. Here of late, memory�??s diction slips, my lexicon less akimbo, loose lipped. What to do but stagger punchdrunk on the lawn�??s glissando, turn, turn ecclesiastical. Sanko on over here, drop pebbled syllabics, six-stringed enjambments like you never done before, howl wordful under a blue moon twice risen. Rapture my puny breath to high heaven: sotto voce, big as all getout. S… (more)