The Watchful Heart Recedes by Ellen Gerneaux Woods

(5 customer reviews)

$14.99

 

With a steady, approachable voice, Ellen Gerneaux Woods’ debut chapbook The Watchful Heart Recedes explores both the tenderness and the tension woven into the mother/daughter bond. She roots her poems in the natural world, beginning this graceful collection with primordial jellyfish and ending with a backyard’s damp grass. As she meditates on the pleasures and paradoxes of single parenting she embraces walnuts, redwoods, racoons at dawn, crows, wild iris, weeping willows, a beloved dog leaving for a new home. In these quietly profound poems Ellen Gerneaux Woods engages with the beauty and wisdom of our earth and our hearts.

–Kathleen McClung, author of A Juror Must Fold in on Herself and Temporary Kin.

 

Anyone who has participated in raising/nurturing a child, and finding the way to continue to nurture even when that child has reached adulthood, will appreciate “The Watchful Heart Recedes” by Ellen Gerneaux Woods.

 

In spare language that respects the intensity and reserve that will safeguard the mother/daughter bond, Ms. Woods guides us gently, movingly, through the stages of parenting through the mystery of Nature’s great gift of life, to the recognition/adoration of one child’s special gifts, to the urgent call to protect and hold close, then to release and wait.  Finally, to welcome back the bond and all it may cost.

 

And in the end, to return to her original family bond, which taught her how to be a good mother.

–Grace Marie Grafton, Lens, Jester, Whimsey Reticence and Laud, Other Clues.

 

Ellen Gerneaux Woods’ The Watchful Heart Recedes explores the tension implicit in maternity, the mother keeping her gaze on her child while still holding awareness of her own “watchful heart.” In these courageous poems we accompany the poet in exploring the connections motherhood brings, “a silver ribbon [that] pulls us to claim it,” a ribbon stretching from herself to her daughter and looping around memories of her own mother, “this woman who loved me / in her own way.” The poet claims and celebrates these relationships, of love mixed with pain “shooting upward / almost to my heart,” of misunderstandings and struggles, and the ache of her child growing beyond her care. We share the poet’s journey as she returns again and again to the solace of nature, claiming her true self “engaged with earth.”

–Lisa Rizzo, author of Always a Blue House and In the Poem an Ocean       lisagpoet@gmail.com

 

 

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Description

The Watchful Heart Recedes

by Ellen Gerneaux Woods

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-713-4

2021

Ellen Gerneaux Woods grew up in Indiana and came to California in the sixties to complete her BA in English at UC Berkeley.  She was captivated by the Civil Rights Movement and after graduation devoted herself to paralegal work.  She later received a MA in Psychology and worked as a psychiatric social worker for Alameda County for fifteen years. After retirement she dedicated herself to studying, writing and publishing  memoir and poetry and her work appears in online and print journals and anthologies. Her debut memoir Warriors in Transition: A Memoir in Twenty-Eight Stories was published in 2014.  She is a judge for the Prose Poem category of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and lives in Oakland, CA

Ellen Gerneaux Woods (Oakland, CA) writes poetry and memoir.  Her debut memoir Warriors in Transition: A Memoir in Twenty-Eight Stories was published in 2014 and her poetry appears in print and on-line publications including Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Bezine, Pudding Magazine, Is it Hot in Here Anthology, Persimmon Tree Magazine and Poems of Political Protest: An Anthology, among others.  Her upcoming chapbook The Watchful Heart Recedes will be published by Finishing Line Press in Dec 2021.

Ellen has received prizes from the Soul-Making Literary Competition (2011-2014) and Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference, and has curated submissions to Bay Area Generations, a monthly literary competition.  She is currently a judge for the Prose Poem category of the Soul-Making Literary Competition and is on the prose editorial staff of The MacGuffin magazine. See her website https://ellenwoods.info for more info.

 

 

5 reviews for The Watchful Heart Recedes by Ellen Gerneaux Woods

  1. Lily (verified owner) –

    I’m an avid reader of my mother’s poetry and love this collection about mothers and daughters,such an important topic. I highly recommend it!

  2. Angie Minkin (verified owner) –

    Ellen Gerneaux Woods has written a beautiful chapbook, filled with poems that will touch your heart and move your spirit. As a single mother, she wrestles with her own demons as she raises her daughter and discovers the joy and anxiety of parenthood. No matter how old our kids are, the “watchful heart recedes” but never loses its loving vigilance. Ellen is a truth-teller and her poems are spare and moving as she writes of birth, adoption, divorce, and families – and the universal theme of love. These are poems of courage, connection, and joy.

  3. Elise Kazanjian (verified owner) –

    I have loved listening to Ellen Woods reading her glorious poetry at events.
    Her poems touch one’s heart and soul, and open different worlds and perspectives.
    Her new book, “The Watchful Heart Recedes” does not disappoint. The poems speak to
    all of us and hold us in their spell especially during these difficult times.

  4. Christy Shepard (verified owner) –

    Ellen Woods’ new book “The Watchful Heart Recedes” has touched a deep cord in me, as I know it will for others. Ellen’s poems are spare and vibrate with breathtaking clarity as she quietly delves into the sometimes painful yet frequently joyous terrain of motherhood, single parenting, adoption, family attachments and separations. Her open-heartedness and startling use of language to simply convey the complexities of living in this world have made me an undying fan of her poetry.

  5. Abby Caplin (verified owner) –

    In “The Watchful Heart Recedes,” Ellen Gerneaux Woods pulls the reader into her story with her quiet and descriptive style, self-aware as she navigates motherhood and witnesses moments of her daughter’s life. Woods’ writing is truthful and compassionate, questioning and poignant. Each poem is like a pearl added onto a strand, so that by the end of the book, I felt I was holding the precious necklace of their mother/daughter relationship in my hand.

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