Kathleen Driskell - Böcker

When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet -- whose last book, Seed across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation -- lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life.Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These "neighbors," with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones.Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell's poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us.

Just as spring struggles to break through late winter, in Kathleen Driskell's new poetry collection, Seed Across Snow, understanding attempts to thaw untended griefs, long dormant. In colorful lyric and complex narrative, Driskell's poems center on recent tragedies surrounding her family's home in an old church rumored to be haunted: a neighbor nearly killed while fetching her mail, a girl abducted and left for dead on the highway behind her house, the drownings of two boys in a local creek. Poems are bound, too, with old sorrows from her past. Each memory that surfaces while living in the old church with its small graveyard next door, reminds that the most sacred, the family, is also the most fragile.