A Family Affair by Ruth Naylor

With these poems Naylor illuminates the complicated terrain of family life. Her courageous telling invites us to bend with her as she kneels down “to check what life had done” and to see how a “spine straight as Biblical law” can soften in response to need and love. This collection holds our common ache for the other.
–Jean Janzen, author of Paper House and Entering the Wild

Ruth Naylor’s alert and graceful poems testify to her long immersion in the difficult beauty of human love. “I do not understand / How love can dwell so close to hurt,” she writes in a typically honest and unsentimental moment. Yet her tracing of this and other mysteries of family relations reminds us that through all the pains and betrayals of life, love does indeed persist. A Family Affair is a gift to us all.
–Jeff Gundy, author of Spoken among the Trees

This collection reads like a memoir compressed into the most essential moments of a life and told through the clear eyes of a grandmother. Ruth Naylor‘s reminiscences do not drift into nostalgia or sentimentality but follow the plain speech of her Quaker background, the compassion of her call to be a Mennonite pastor, and the discernment of her work as a spiritual director.
–Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Poetry in America

In these poems Ruth Naylor holds her own experience in the light. She does not avoid the pain of loss and separation in her life, and she ponders “how love can dwell so close to hurt….” In reading her poems about family, we can see our own family experience in a new light.
–Richard A. Kauffman, book review editor, Christian Century

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]