Changing Times by Adele Kearney

Adele Kearney’s Changing Times captures me. I smell the hyacinths, the hollyhocks, walk the streets of Rome. Her words like spring petals carry in the wind. Of grandparents and other family remembered, from “There, There, Oakland” to “Mr. Stevens’ Dictation,” she honors place, work, and home. Read these gems. They sparkle.

–Nellie Wong, author of Breakfast Lunch Dinner and other books of poetry and and one of nine women authors in their seventies and eighties in Speaking for Myself, edited by Sondra Zeidenstein.

The poems in Changing Times by Adele Kearney are memories, slanting reminiscences of her Irish Catholic family. You are there, sitting on kindly Daddy’s “good leg,”  helping her queenly mother, and winding through her adventures in Oakland, California, and Rome. The poems are threads in the tapestry of her growing up, finding herself as a mother, a worker, a writer, and becoming political, part of changing minds and changing times. Each poem has a rhythm and a clue to who Adele is.  How her mother got her name and married Adele’s father. Life in a coal town. How her father opened a beer business. Adele and her friends hunting violets.  The streets of Rome still haunted by Nazi history. A wry view of Wallace Stevens dictating his poems to secretaries and on to her original mix of the beauty of flowers and those who take care of them and what life with flowers means. A found cat named Mama Boots. Adele changes some of what we expect of such poems.  Cute is never there, only beauty.

–Phyllis Holliday, whose stories and poems have won prizes, among them First,  Second,  and Third Prizes for Soulmaker-Keats, and District 3 and 6 prizes from San Francisco Poets 11.