TheyStandUpinBrokenShells

Literature: American Poetry/Women’s Studies

One of the army of Whitman’s democratic poets, a
decorated veteran—this is Nita Penfold and her
poetry. Chances are, if you’ve been following poetry
over the last two decades, you’ve already
encountered her fierce, funny, bone deep honest
verse. This book-length collection, boiled down to the
essentials from over 300 published works, is a
chronicle of the late 20th century life of America’s do-
right, feisty, laboring sisters/mothers/daughters. In
what seems like innumerable anthologies from CRIES
OF THE SPIRIT, to CATHOLIC GIRLS, to IF I HAD MY
LIFE TO LIVE OVER I WOULD PICK MORE DAISIES,
Nita’s unflinching, mischievous verse has soldiered
up next to works by Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov,
Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds and
other modern luminaries. Here, in this collection,
holding its own, testifying, singing of poem-polyps, of
the toilet paper treatise, of cock-thunderers, it carries
on, affirming the unheralded histories that are mostly
un-HIS-toried. Her direct, powerful, delicious verse
stands witness to the anonymous survivors of daily
battles, that never seem to win the war. This
collection, shot through with her bravery, inhabiting a
known and contested world, filled with recognizable
warriors, their practical dilemmas, and the unending
struggle for grace, is a rare gift. Nita Penfold is a
diamond of a poet and this is a gem of a collection.

—David Earl Williams, writer, director, editor
author of Superman Dreams

$15.00
available from www.lulu.com/nitapenfold

Preview of
They Stand Up in Broken Shells

CALLING                        ©Nita Penfold

You wake to the honey
light before anyone else, perch
on the long wooden stairtop,
wishing to be old enough to
drag the wide-bottomed boat
out alone, to command the creak
of oars, the water’s flash, to
steer to where the Buddha-frogs
nightly chant their steely croak,
where the water spiders stride
across the surface like complacent
miracles, where something calls
to you like the red-winged blackbird
clinging to the high reeds skirting
the lake and you want to purse
your mouth just so
and answer,    yes,
yes.

AS I WATCH MY DAUGHTER MARRY
©Nita Penfold

I remember her at eleven:
she will not let me love her,
slams the door between us,
wants to be grown so fast but
complains as her nipples widen,
soft and tender and aching.
I wish I could explain to her how
fast everything goes by and that I need
to slow it all down, but she is always
pushing for something more that she
imagines is a prize for being older and
we can never come to agreement over terms.

In a calm moment on her grandmother's back porch,
we discover an infant robin who flew too early
on the lawn under the box elder, bottom heavy
like a diapered baby, it's stick wings
working furiously, barely lifting it back up
toward its rough nest again and again.
Both of us afraid to touch the bird for fear
its mother might abandon it from our scent,
we watch the baby's struggle, cheering it on,
and my daughter slides
closer to me on the step.

BEGIN                        ©Nita Penfold

      “You must begin with ‘I cannot tell’”
                             --Muriel Rukeyser

I cannot tell how grief
hollowed a child’s body out
and made a woman’s shell.

I cannot tell how death slid
into a small life and opened it
suddenly, like a door with a cold draught.

I cannot tell about the voice that calls me
in my sleep, that tiny fat woman who carefully
sews together the lips of children

with black thread;
they are already silent,
it is only a precaution.

I cannot tell.

HUNGER ENOUGH:
Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society
Nita Penfold, editor.

Poems and short prose on intentional living.
Pudding House anthology based on observations
about the gluttonous American culture but isn’t
intended to beat us over the head or make us feel
guilty with every turn of the page.
Released in 2004.
Perfect bound, full color cover, beautiful
production, 128 pp, $18, ISBN: 1589982495.

Pudding House Publications

“But mostly I want to say how privileged I feel to know you: your collection
of poems is like a Northern Light, making a bleak cold sky come alight. As
a literary critic (and occasional pedantic poet), I spend much time studying
that elusive Voice every real poet must find and embody, a Voice deeply
contextual yet for that very reason speaking out of every time and space.
Your work is an incarnation of that Voice: real and true and incisive,
modeling a truthful way of being in the world that most humans cannot
even imagine.”
--Carole Fontaine, Professor, Andover Newton Theological School