Waiting for Someone to Find Me by Francine E. Walls

Light and movement flood these poems, starlight and firelight, nameless ponds, rivers pulsing, ancient trees and deserts shimmering beneath a haloed moon. Through these pages a woman, too, moves, quick as light. She holds out her hands and invites us to join her in a dance.   

–Bethany Reid, author of Sparrow and Body, My House.

Francine’s poems provide a merging of the natural world with discovery and appreciation for oneself. The reader explores the natural world and the garden in vivid details that are visual and visceral. She moves the readers gaze from the page to connection and empathy which stirs in each of us. Sauk River, North Fork serves as an anthem to the northwest woods, accurate in its details and like Prism helps us feel the exhilaration of discovery. Altogether the collection offers a pathway to and appreciation for exploring our sensate world.   

–Carla Shafer, author of Remembering the Path & publisher of Peace Poems, Vol. 1 & 2.

In Waiting for Someone to Find Me, Francine Walls’ thoughtful poetry can be searing, like desert sun—powerful and distinctly beautiful. Images of drought recur, framing danger and anxiety, yet there is also love, which opens amid blades of desert plants and shy sprigs of herbs and crocuses. These poems take readers on an emotional and spiritual quest, to the American Southwest, the British Isles, the Mediterranean coast, and Africa. “When you can’t go on with someone, what then?” asks the speaker in “Pleiades.” Letting go provides a unifying theme for this book. In one piece, the speaker remembers a person who “has gone into soil, to humus,” and imagines herself in the garden where “my hands caress its darkness.” A child is born with difficulty; another clings to a parent’s leg. One poem about a visit to a convent frames the interaction as “through iron lace dividing the cloistered room.” Another poem reflects the disabling aftermath of great loss, as if one must re-learn to walk and speak. Throughout, this rewarding collection offers sharp lessons from the poet’s hard-earned wisdom and helps the reader imagine how—despite pain—one can “sing like the owl in the juniper.”

–Jayne Marek, author of In and Out of Rough Water and The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling