Showcasing our authors – Glenda Kerney Brown: endlessly inventive

Glenda Kerney Brown’s poetry collection, Rock and Lodestone, published by Bennison Books, includes an introduction by the British poet James Nash. He writes:

With these endlessly inventive and marvellous poems Glenda Kerney Brown explores the things that she values, the things that she cleaves to, and the underlying tragedy of our human experience, which is that we inevitably lose (or are lost to) the things we love.
 
The title ‘Rock and Lodestone’ has a medieval flavour to it, from a time before compasses, when travellers relied on more primitive ways of finding their way around a largely unknown world; and, of course, many of the poems in this very fine, first collection deal with Glenda’s journey into MS, its mysterious and uncharted waters, and the challenges and limitations found there. But the poems are about the triumph of the human spirit, of snatching victory from what seems to be unavoidable extinction, and allowing the reader the privilege of experiencing some of that journey too.

Rock and Lodestone is available from Amazon.

Below are two particularly beautiful poems from the collection:

The Box

The box is black, olden, Eastern,
bearing swaddled symbols,
embers of fire in the memory:
kin koi carp in mid-leap, lunging,
lilies leaning, pinned with butterflies,
and butterflies, butterflies, lifting
the mottled green leaves, which trail
direct from the islands of Japan.

(Kin is a Japanese word pertaining specifically to koi carp, meaning golden metallic.)

Sonnet for Us

When thoughtlessly I turn to meet your eyes,
the ripest recognition floods me through,
in blind and helpless love, my old world dies,
calling to question things I thought I knew.
The new life sucks us in, we have no choice,
no chance to mull “Could this be my true love?
How do we differ? Will it be their voice
I’ll tune to all my life, or get sick of?”
Cold time is dealing out relentless hands,
would we have looked away, if we but knew?
You cry “No! we must live by fate’s commands,
Hold tight our nightly vows of ‘I love you’.”
So now we battle on, and as I dim,
You care for me, and though I sink, we swim.