First Mud by Jane Attanucci

First Mud by Jane Attanucci

(1 customer review)

$14.49

 

 

Jane Attanucci‘s First Mud holds the richness and poignance of memory, of a cherished family’s store of love and grief, from Galway’s shores to crooners and “forbidden cigarettes” and Manhattans: the stuff of life. Although another poet tells her that “the poems are writing you,” Attanucci is the gifted creator of the alchemy that writes these moving lyric poems.
–Gail Mazur, author of Figures in a Landscape and Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

These startling and swift poems are origin stories told by a poet who understands the bittersweet truth of adult life, a woman who dares to stand at the unsteady border between her mother and her own motherhood. Jane Attanucci speaks in simple, steel-strong sentences. All artifice scraped away, she masterfully evokes America’s muscular mid-century cities and “the ordinary austerities” of a big and sometimes brutal Irish-Catholic family. And as winter yields to spring, so newborn joy breaks through First Mud, sometimes bursting like a peony or erupting in contagious laughter at the dinner table, but often surreptitious as a hummingbird, elusive as an unseen child ringing bells on a row of locked-up bikes.
–Michael Downing, author of Perfect Agreement and The Chapel

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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First Mud

by Jane Attanucci

$14.49, paper

Jane Attanucci, finalist in the 2014 Blast Furnace Chapbook Contest and a recipient of the New England Poetry Club’s Barbara Bradley Prize, has poems published in the Aurorean, Blast Furnace, Right Hand Pointing, Still Crazy, and Third Wednesday, among others. She holds an Ed.D. in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After a career of college teaching and research, she began writing fiction and poetry. Attanucci lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

1 review for First Mud by Jane Attanucci

  1. Jami Macarty (verified owner) –

    Up through the manure and mud–a rose! Or, in Jane Attanucci’s case–poems! Through received and invented forms, these beautiful, tender, and austere poems recount and reconcile the bedlam of childhood in a traditional, Catholic family of eight children, who were “hers,” meaning the mother’s, while the father “retreated from the bedtime chaos.” The poem “My Poet’s Eye at Dusk, seems to answer this division:

    “His, hers, who knows?
    Aren’t we all the same,
    seekers of sustenance…”

    My favorite poem in the collection is “Of These Women” in which the speaker’s matrilineal line is named and honored. This poem also showcases this poet’s restraint and austerity; in another poet’s hands, this poem would turn toward the maudlin, but not so here. Not so in these wonderful poems.

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