Remnants by Ruth Derrick

What do writers do at a writers’ conference? They celebrate honesty and risk. Recently, we dared to say that sentimentality is the risk most worth taking. In Ruth Derrick’s Remnants, honesty blooms, sweetened with sorrow, marked achingly with the briefness of human life. Derrick risks telling of love, and the pain of loss—not some generalized, idealized loss, but the loss signified by walkers, canes, wheel-chairs, the eroding of mobility. In the poem, “Unexpected,” she sums the loss up succinctly—“Speech left. / Safe eating left. / Walking solo left. / But laughter never left.” How hope shines in this book, not only in the laughter, but in poems such as “Lourdes in My Bathroom,” and “Two in One”! The journey Derrick takes the reader on is one which, to risk cliché, will touch the heart and bring a tear to the eye. Beautifully, it is also a journey of faith, and redemption breathes even in the environs of decay and death.
–Charles A. Swanson

Ruth Derrick’s poems give us a somewhat sassy woman’s moments of daring, accidents survived, lessons learned when a dad’s tears mingle with his daughter’s. She gives us treasured memories and a sense of loss, but in that loss is always the sense of warmth as the two bodies drift off to “their separate worlds,”of the laughter that “never left.”
–Chelsea Adams, Looking for a Landing published by Sow’s Ear Press, At Last Light published by Finishing Line Press.

Ruth Derrick’s poetry is a paean to the ordinary moments of life, which, collectively, constitute an extraordinary whole. Her title, Remnants, suggests random bits and pieces; her subtitles, however, provide focus – first on a family, “Their Past”; then an individual, “My Past”; next a couple, “Our Past”; and finally, again an individual, “My Now.” Together the remnants form a totality, a crazy quilt perhaps or a “coat of many colors,” but a whole cloth to be savored, laughed about, wept over, and cherished. The narrator says in the opening poem, “I come for the stories.” For the reader the stories call forth personal moments, both ordinary and extraordinary. Not every reader will have suffered the loss of a beloved partner, but every reader is likely to have pored over photographs, often to exclaim, “I remember this!” Ruth Derrick’s beautifully integrated poetry collection inspires us to stitch together the remnants of our own lives.
–Grace Toney Edwards, Professor Emerita of Appalachian Studies and English, Radford University, Radford, Virginia