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Fleda Brown

Autor de Breathing In, Breathing Out

15+ Obras 99 Miembros 5 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Fleda Brown has won the Felix Pollak Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught mostrar más for twenty-seven years. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan. mostrar menos

Incluye el nombre: Fleda Brown Jackson

Créditos de la imagen: Courtesy of author.

Obras de Fleda Brown

Obras relacionadas

The Best American Poetry 2009 (2009) — Contribuidor — 133 copias
The Best American Poetry 2010 (2010) — Contribuidor — 121 copias
The Best American Poetry 2019 (2019) — Contribuidor — 57 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female
Educación
University of Arkansas
Ocupaciones
Teacher
poet
Premios y honores
poet laureate of Delaware

Miembros

Reseñas

MORTALITY, WITH FRIENDS is, I think my fifth Fleda Brown book. I think of her as a Michigan writer, but she is actually a transplant from the south via the University of Delaware where she taught for years and was also that state's poet laureate for a few years. As the title indicates, these essays deal with mortality and are often indeed deep meditations on the subjects of aging, death and dying. Not happy subjects to be sure, but certainly something any thinking person does consider, once he's reached a certain age. And I'm there, the same age as Brown, actually, so yes, I could relate, when she says something like -

"I'm seventy-five. I've had my share of life, I say to myself. I can feel my life, even in good health, slowly, inexorably, beginning to wrap up. Spotted skin, deep rivulets of skin on my arms when I hold them up, arthritis."

Oh yeah, that age-spotted, crepe-like skin. Me too, Fleda. It's always with a sense of wonder that I view these suddenly(?) old arms. (And, by the way, we're both 77 now, so, maybe even more so.)

Brown currently lives in Traverse City, in a condo - "Our huge building used to be the Northern Michigan State Asylum." But she takes us back repeatedly in these essays to the family cottage on Central Lake where she spent her summers (and still does). She says -

"When I was a child, at our lake there was Old Dave, who lived in a little house not a quarter mile up what's now called Woody Knoll Road. We walked all the way to the top picking wild blackberries for Old Dave."

Probably not really relevant, but my mind goes where it goes, and I was immediately reminded of the route we took regularly to our own summer cabin on Indian lake. We would head north on the Cedar Road, which took us past a tiny shack on the west side of the road surrounded by a small grove of apple trees, where, supposedly, an old woman lived all alone. My brothers and I would watch for the shack and try to be the first to cry, "I see Apple Mary's place!"

Old Dave, Apple Mary - childhood memories.

Brown's father, Philips Brown, crops up repeatedly in these essays. An economist and something of a genius, her father's academic career was troubled by his inability to relate to other people. Undiagnosed Asperger's plagued his interpersonal relationships - or lack of them - throughout his life, and his family often bore the brunt of his "different-ness." Philips Brown lived to be nearly a hundred years old, and Fleda, as the oldest daughter, became his de facto guardian during those final years. There are also frequent mentions of her "brain-damaged" brother, subject to fits and seizures, a source of guilt, pain and heartache to Brown's mother, as well as to Brown herself, who wonders if her first, impulsive marriage at just seventeen was mostly a way out of her chaotic, dysfunctional family life. Indeed, the subject of her first two marriages also come up often here, as well as the difficulties she and her current husband are dealing with - cancer, illnesses and surgeries, as well as the usual bumps and difficulties of growing old together.

There is also a telling chapter ("Techie Audiology") on the trials and tribulations of losing your hearing. She introduces this piece with a reference to David Lodge's novel, "Deaf Sentence," in which he writes -

"Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse."

Absolutely. I get it, because, like Brown, I too have suffered from tinnitus for over fifty years now, and it never goes away. You just adapt, you get used to it. In any case, boy, could I relate. I have hearing aids too, but I hate to wear them. She has plenty to say about the social consequences and implications of losing your hearing and she is spot on about all of it.

Brown also discusses the devastating, negative impact of the Trump years, although she barely mentions the man(?) himself.

"Also, don't you know, I am stuck in the United States of America as it roils and boils into some new thing? I am married to it no matter that it appears to have grown fat and self-centered and mean. I didn't know that the seeds of this were there all along ... Now I am plodding along, day by day, as astounded as if I had just discovered I was married to an addict. How could I not have seen the signs ..."

And in a separate piece, as she tries to understand her husband's chronic, crippling back pain, she comments -

"Your pain is real, yet I can't feel it ... Yet it enters me as the daily news enters me. I fill myself with poetry and music as antidote."

And of course these days the daily news does often equate to pain. But yes, we will always have poetry and music. A good book can always help, can indeed alleviate trouble and pain.

Brown's meditations on death and dying, particularly in her stories of her father, and his long, difficult-making life, are not easy to read. But I appreciated them. They took me back to the last months and weeks of my mother's life, who lived to be 96. I remember asking Mom if she thought a lot about Dad, who had been gone for nearly twenty-five years. She would say, no, that she dreamed and thought more about her own mom and dad, wondering what they thought about at the ends of their lives. And now I get that. Like Mom, I think often about my parents these days, just as Fleda Brown still obviously wrestles with questions about her father and mother. So many questions I still have, that will never be answered now. Brown too, I suspect.

Thank you, Fleda, for these thoughtful and meditative essays about - yes, mortality. Beautifully written, filled with allusions to some of the best writing of the western world. You made me realize that life is still a mystery, there's so much I still don't know, and that every day is a gift. This is a book filled with wisdom. I wish I were better at explaining it. But yes, thank you. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
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Denunciada
TimBazzett | Sep 6, 2021 |
As a lifelong lover of good books, and a geezer who is himself growing old in the company of many good books, I found GROWING OLD IN POETRY a pure pleasure to read. It is essentially a back and forth conversation between two former state poets laureate (Lea from Vermont, Brown from Delaware) on such diverse topics as books, music, food, sex, sickness, animals, children, and, of course, poetry. Fleda Brown I knew from a few of her earlier books - her memoir-in-essays, DRIVING WITH DVORAK, was my introduction to her work. I met Fleda briefly at a reading in Northport, MI, at Dog Ears Books, where I got a signed copy of her early poetry collection, THE WOMEN WHO LOVED ELVIS ALL THEIR LIVES, which so charmed me that I later read - and enjoyed - another collection, a bit weightier, NO NEED OF SYMPATHY. Sydney Lea's work I was not familiar with at all, but his half of this book has piqued my interest enough that I will certainly look him up.

The back and forth nature of the format here reminded me of another poets' collaboration I read about some years back - BRAIDED CREEK: A CONVERSATION IN POETRY - although I'm forced to confess I have not yet read that book, co-authored by the late Jim Harrison (a Michigan treasure), and former U.S. poet laureate, Ted Kooser. But I would be willing to bet that both Brown & Lea HAVE read that book, since references to both Harrison and Kooser pop up here and there. (Another Michigan writer, Jerry Dennis, shows up here too, and I have read a few of his books too. Indeed some of the subject matter here brought Jerry's work to mind even before he was mentioned.)

Although Lea reveals himself to be more of a "man's man" than I could ever claim to be, with his ruminations on his youthful hockey prowess ("Sports: Suicidal Beauty"), skills as a woodsman and hunter ("Preludes," "Books: What Will Suffice," and "Food: Wild Black Duck"), and his fearlessness (perhaps misplaced) with a chainsaw ("Illness: To Take a Flop), I did sense a kindred spirit in his love of jazz (Miles Davis, Milt Jackson and Cannonball Adderley) and how its improvisations can be akin to certain forms of poetry ("Music: I Recognize Thy Glory …"). I could also relate to his feelings of failure and missed chances in being a father ("Children: What's Normal? What's Better?"), because what father has not felt he could have done a better job with his kids?

In the "Books" section I was somewhat surprised to find that neither Brown nor Lea were really early lovers of books, although they do mention a few tomes that got them started. For Lea it was THE GOOD EARTH, THE YEARLING, and Ernest Thompson Seton's WILD ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN - all books I devoured in my youth. Brown calls her childhood self a "lazy" reader who read and re-read THE BOXCAR CHILDREN, but not BLACK BEAUTY, instead "I was being a horse, galloping across the playground." She sampled the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but only "some of them." It wasn't until college that books really became important to her and she began to consume the classics - Dickens, Camus, Tolstoy - and remembers, "One Christmas holiday, I read WAR AND PEACE, page by gloriously laborious page."

The "Illness" portion of their exchange also touched a familiar chord in me. Lea remembers a doctor's visit when his arm was badly burned as a child, and being attended to and tucked into "Mom and Dad's bed … in my parents' bedroom as the archetypal example of peace, comfort and protection." Brown remembers her mother "bringing me poached egg on toast, straightening my covers," and reading from Robert Louis Stevenson's A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. Hey, me too, Fleda - same book. But my mom would bring me homemade eggnog and peeled, sliced apples. But yes to both of your recollections of childhood sick rooms - "peace, comfort, protection." With that kind of loving care, who wouldn't occasionally want "to take a flop "?

There's even a section on "Politics" here, and it seems the two poets and I are of like mind regarding what is happening in today's political arena. Fleda remembers her parents' politics from the era of "I Like Ike" and Adlai Stevenson. Me too. But enough said on that. (Why ruin my good mood?)

I could go on, but I don't want to spoil anything for other readers. Let me just say this: If you love books and good writing, you will love this book. I'll say it again - a pure pleasure. I loved every page of it. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
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Denunciada
TimBazzett | Jan 16, 2019 |
Poetry has a tendency to intimidate me, maybe because I often wonder, "Am I really 'getting' this stuff?" It's probably a carryover from all those badly taught English classes in which, as students, we were forced to find the "meaning" of each poem. Remember? Fleda Brown was an English professor for many years, and I'll bet she didn't do that to her students. But there is something about Brown's newest collection, NO NEED OF SYMPATHY, that keeps me coming back to ponder these poems (or "pomes," as we used to call them as kids) over and over again, and each time they seem to mean a little more. And I think, maybe I AM 'getting' them, or at least partially.

There's this odd one in here called "The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower" that I've read over and over again, with its image of Brown in her kayak, as it "slides trough the water and the paddle / goes on one side and then the other ..." And there are these flashing half-remembered fragments of memory from when she was very small, walking with her mother, "the sidewalk rough / the way a child remembers the sidewalk: closer / than it will ever be again ..." And she wonders about these vague memory flashes as she paddles, of her mother's anger, maybe at her father's infidelity "his postcard ... from that woman in the Philippines, back when / he was a soldier ..." A memory so hazy, so questionable "it was like the Eiffel tower, all filigree / and lace ..."

It reads the way a dream feels. I read this poem one night just before sleep, and I actually dreamed of the Eiffel tower that night, part of a confusing collage of images from my own life past and present, as dreams so often are. Powerful stuff, dreams and poems.

Particularly resonant in these times is the poem, "Here, In Silence, Are Eight More," beginning with "Night after night the photos of dead soldiers / go by on the News Hour like playing cards while we drink / our wine ..." The war poets Owen, Brooke and Sassoon are invoked, as well as the children's book, unnamed, but obviously MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS.

"... Our soldier floats like a duck. Like a night flight
casket. In the photo his eyes straight forward, being all
they can be ... One snapshot in time ..."

That army recruiting slogan, "Be all you can be," coupled here with a casket, and a photo of a heartbreakingly young face, "His death rests / like a quarter in the pocket, a sure thing ..." This is a poem that makes me weep - or rage: against the military machine and an indifferent populace that tacitly condone such senseless carnage.

Another poem which moved me nearly to tears, probably because my own late mother is still so much on my mind, is "Building a Cathedral," which begins with Gaudi's unfinished cathedral in Barcelona, but quickly moves to the poet's own father, 92, filling his days with pointless activity, because nothing "matters to my father anymore, which I notice is a frequent / condition of extreme age ..." She sees overtones of Becket's WAITING FOR GODOT in her father's life. "... On the phone / he tells me he'd rather be dead if it wouldn't hurt ..." My own mother once told me the exact same thing just a few weeks before she died, alone, at 96. Yes, so very many people who have watched aged parents decline and die will recognize themselves here. And will probably weep.

There are so many wonderfully thoughtful - beautiful - pieces here: a collection of very personal sonnets to her grandchildren ("The Grandmother Sonnets"), homages to old family photos ("Photo of Us on the Cottage Front Porch"), remembering desperate, deceitful students "whose grandmothers die / and die again, just before holidays." ("Michigan"). Or, "Child labor" which "is desperately sought by both the manufacturers / and the starving children. Morality is another one of those words." In "Memorial Day" Brown muses about the terrible fragility of life and the randomness of death.

But I better stop. There are close to fifty poems here, and they all are simply wonderful. And I think they've taught me something, and it's this: there is never just one correct "meaning" for any poem worth its salt. There will be, in fact, as many meanings as there are readers. Fleda Brown's poems have their own lives. They are pieces from not just her life, but from all of our lives. They are timeless. NO NEED OF SYMPATHY takes its title from the poet Robert Creeley, who wrote: "Poetry stands in no need of any sympathy, or even goodwill." Brown's poems here bear this out. Highly recommended.
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Denunciada
TimBazzett | Aug 4, 2013 |
I found Fleda Brown a year or so ago, through her memoir/essay collection, DRIVING WITH DVORAK, which was simply superb. But she's known primarily for her poetry. Although I'm not much of a poetry fan, I figured a book of poems with Elvis in the title might be something I could at least relate to, if not completely understand (my usual problem with poetry: it often leaves me feeling clueless and stupid). And it turned out I was right - mostly. Because although I was a pretty loyal Elvis fan (the very first LP I ever bought , at 12, was his Christmas album), I can't remember ever getting on my knees to kiss his poster ("Tillywilly Fog"). But there were plenty of other references here I could certainly "get." Gene Autry, Elvis's army hiatus (during which time my own favorite, Ricky Nelson, reigned supreme on the pop charts). I'm pretty sure Ricky gets mentioned here too, as well as Roy Orbison, although I'm pretty sure Roy, who had his own distinctive sound, never really tried "to sound like Elvis," as Brown avers in the title poem. The Beatles are in here too, as well as the Cold War (with which I am extremely familiar). And then there's "Sputnik, 1957," which needs no explanation, as well as the famous meeting between Elvis and Nixon. Even Rod Stewart's "Maggie Mae" is in here, which reminded me of the first time I heard that song, on the highway between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti just as my VW muffler blew out. But Brown's poems are also very personal, with their references to family, coming of age, raging hormones, failed marriages and more. As poetry goes, THE WOMEN WHO LOVED ELVIS ALL THEIR LIVES, is a quirky combination of funny and profound. Even for a poetry moron like me, it was eminently accessible. If you grew up in the 50s and 60s, you'll probably like these poems.… (más)
 
Denunciada
TimBazzett | Jul 1, 2012 |

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