Cheryl Snell's Blog, page 12

“April Rain Song”

 ----by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—
And I love the rain.

Peter Greenaway - Intervals (1969)

The Twain: Poems of Earth and Ether

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 New Eve Publishing has just released historical novelist Rosy Cole’s first collection of poems.
Reflective, rhapsodic, comic, tragic, this collection of poems harmonises varied layers of human experience.
Rosy Cole was born and educated in the Shires of England and now lives on the West Sussex coast. A professional writer for over thirty years, she has worked as a Press Officer and Publisher's Reader and is a member of the Society of Authors (UK) and the Historical Novel Society.
To celebrate publication of The Twain, Poems of Earth and Ether , New Eve Publishing is offering a free signed copy to anyone who's commented on a poem on Cole's Red Room pages. Just contact her through Red Room and let her know where to mail your copy. 

Earth and Ether from New Eve Publishing

[image error]

 New Eve Publishing has just released historical novelist Rosy Cole’s first collection of poems.
Reflective, rhapsodic, comic, tragic, this collection of poems harmonises varied layers of human experience.
Rosy Cole was born and educated in the Shires of England and now lives on the West Sussex coast. A professional writer for over thirty years, she has worked as a Press Officer and Publisher's Reader and is a member of the Society of Authors (UK) and the Historical Novel Society.
To celebrate publication of The Twain, Poems of Earth and Ether , New Eve Publishing is offering a free signed copy to anyone who's commented on a poem on Cole's Red Room pages. Just contact her through Red Room and let her know where to mail your copy. 

Béla Bartók

To My Sister On Her Birthday

Lines for an Earth Day

We’re out in the yard, doing what we do—
he’s mulching, I’m dividing bulbs. If you go
with perennials, you never start from scratch.


When we’re done, he tucks my hand in his.
Our stack of lined palms and thin-skinned fingers
nest like sparrows returned to the redbud tree.

One spring, they came in with a ribbon tied
to a burst balloon. Lashing one end to a branch,
they wove the satin through their cup of netted twigs.

It took them hours; and while they worked
they sang
as if courage had nothing to do with it.

Fire on the Cuyahoga

Today's Feature: Because my name is mother...

[image error] Deborah Batterman's new ebook, just published as a Kindle Single, is intimate and inventive. The linked essays in Because My Name is Mother are rich with telling details. Objects and everyday acts resonate until we can see ourselves in the vivid moments the author creates. There's the photograph of the author’s parents, “young and happy and vibrant, maybe even in love.” There's the author’s attempt to keep her dying mother’s traditions alive, but in her own way. The end of a grown daughter’s visit is touchingly rendered by her mother’s homely act of making her bed.

About the collection, Deborah says,"There's a progression in the way these pieces hold together -- the first two from the perspective of the daughter reflecting on her mother, the last two from the perspective of the mother reflecting on her daughter. Smack in the middle sits 'Cute?!#@Sixty,' a favorite in the way it serves as a fulcrum on which both my mother and my daughter sit."

Deborah Batterman fills the senses with her poignant, funny observations of family and modern life, drawing the reader in, revealing layers of existence with the nuanced phrase, the apt symbol. Whether photographs or fabulous shoes, the refrains make this a collection to savor. “There are some things you just never want to come to an end” the author says in “Sweet Indulgences.” For me, reading Because My Name is Mother is one of them.

Author Deborah Batterman is a native New Yorker, a fiction writer and essayist. Her stories have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals. A story from her debut collection, Shoes Hair Nails, available in both print and digital editions, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her new Kindle Single, just in time for Mother's Day, is called

Learn more about Deborah at the following sites: Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, and her blog, The Things She Thinks About. . .

Rachmaninoff plays Schumann