Bøger af Marla Kay Houghteling

These poems chronicle the life of the author's mother (1924-2011) in an attempt to keep her mother from disappearing as dementia removes her from loved ones and memories. The subject, Kathleen Marie Cole Houghteling, grew up in a Michigan village, where her father ran the local bank. She married a local boy, Jack Houghteling, and followed him around the country as he moved from base to base for the U.S. Army during WWII. The deaths of their first daughter, her father, then her mother occured early in her life. The couple had three more daughters. Though the family left their village of Walkerville, a deep connection to the place remained. Kay Houghteling was a gifted pianist, accompanying choral groups at 14. Music was at the core of her being and accompanied her through her last years with dementia. This is a daiughter's perspective on her mother's life through poems written with admiration, guilt, love and longing.

Winter 1898. Martin Starr leaves his farm in the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula to seek his fortune as a Klondiker in the Alaskan Gold Rush. His wife Aurora stays behind to manage the farm and teach at the local school while he and his boyhood friend Frank embark on the "Deadly Edmonton Trail." A year later Aurora goes to look for him, her fears for her husband compelling her across the continent to Seattle, then on to Alaska and finally into British Columbia. When Aurora finds her husband at Dease Lake, B.C., their reunion is not what she expected. The Gold Rush has changed them both. The couple and the whole nation, on the cusp of the 20th century, will soon be swept into a new, uncertain world. In the end, the upheavals in Aurora's life take her on a journey more unpredictable than Martin's odyssey in the mountains, rivers and muskegs of Canada.

Here is homage finely wrought-for the home place, its seasons and people, for nature's inventory of the living and dead-all of it tendered with virtuosity and imaginative grace. -Thomas Lynch, author of Still Life in Milford, The Undertaking -Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest Do not dismiss this poet in her own country...Michigan, an emotional geography deeply experienced, prized and evoked. Houghteling's poems in her new book, The Blue House, work Zen-like on me with intense, unpredictable simplicity. Like one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, Marla Kay Houghteling climbs inside nature's heart, exciting in mine dormant memories and oft-lost priorities. I understand at once her woman's voice, compassionate, wise, witness to her own life and the lives that move her. I especially urge this universally appealing collection on Michigan readers and libraries. -Mary Blocksma, author of Lake Lover's Year, Great Lakes Nature and What's on the Beach The Blue House is an important collection of poems which trace the changing land- scape of Lake Michigan's northern shores and the inner life of the people living there. People and landscape are so well interwoven that at times it seems they are body and soul claiming the last bits of beauty and humanity. In our age of concrete, plastic and steel the celebration of native trees, flowers, and butterflies claiming a place outside of time is remarkably powerful and significant. Poem after poem says in moving, lucid and yes, local language, that there are still people naming trees, naming feelings, naming loss, naming aging by their proper, unforgettable names. If you want to know what it is like to live Up North in Michigan, take The Blue House as a guide. -Carmen Bugan, author of Crossing the Carpathians These lovely poems by Marla Kay Houghteling encapsulate vivid moments in a woman's life. Her poems sing of love and loss, joy and grief, and of color. -Ann Bardens-McClellan, author of Stone and Water There is quiet beauty in these poems. Houghteling takes us "through the sweetness of milkweed" and into a pungent landscape of the heart. She offers us tough houses of memory in a northern Michigan "icebox winter," but "in summer monarchs pile up." This is a poet who "can find snow in July." We are blessed and transformed. -Margo LaGattuta, poet, essayist, author of Embracing the Fall