Winter Ecology by Kathleen Naureckas

Every one. Of Kathleen Naureckas’ short poems is as rich as a short story. Put together, they take you on a moving journey through one woman’s entire life. We meet the Catholic girl from a big family who couldn’t wait to shave her legs. We meet the young woman on her wedding night wearing her new nightgown. We meet the middle-aged mother, an eventually the older woman with cancer, who sees resurrection in the planting of tulip bulbs.

Naureckas’ poems are intimate yet universal, both witty and melancholy. She’s a master of concision and the final line, which may hve something to do with her work as a longtime copy editor at the Chicago Tribune. She writes about that too. In a poem about her retirement, she describes her decision to “set sail for Galapagos, hoping to meet myself.” All these poems are about a woman meeting herself. Their genius is to help us, the readers, meet ourselves too.

–Mary Schmich, Metro Columnist, Chicago Tribune

There is an elegiac quality to Kathleen Naureckas’ poetry. In her poems, Naureckas is thinking about the duration of her life, and there’s much that is melancholic. For me, there is an added poignancy to these poems and this collection. Kathleen Naureckas and I worked together at the Chicago Tribune. I know that, in 2020, in the depths of the first year of the Covid pandemic, Kathleen died at the age of 83.

When she wrote these poems, Kathleen was looking back on much that she had lived on much that had disappeared or had greatly changed, and on much that was mournful, such as the loss of family members and the loneliness of being left behind. Yet all these poems exhibit a strength of character—an openness to the need to face loss and change and deal with it. They are fine testament to Kathleen’s life and her art.

–Patrick T. Reardon