Fleda Brown
Autor de Breathing In, Breathing Out
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
Créditos de la imagen: Courtesy of author.
Obras de Fleda Brown
Obras relacionadas
When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (1900) — Contribuidor — 11 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- female
- Educación
- University of Arkansas
- Ocupaciones
- Teacher
poet - Premios y honores
- poet laureate of Delaware
Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 15
- También por
- 4
- Miembros
- 99
- Popularidad
- #191,538
- Valoración
- 3.9
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 24
"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… (más)