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Sample
poems:
Fearing the Loss
of My Hounds
Fire
Baton (page 1, page
2)
Public
Transportation
Read
an interview with the author
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Fire
Baton
Poems
by Elizabeth Hadaway
A
cross between Yeats and a seasoned moonshiner
Elizabeth Hadaway
doesn’t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to
delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for
performance. Sparkling with shout-outs to Beowulf and Keats,
varied meters, and surprising rhymes, she lifts centuries
of hurt and anger into a contrary music. Her reach is vast,
including everything from T. S. Eliot to the swans on her
vinyl lace shower curtains. She warns us off from stereotypes
and misconceptions about Appalachia and the South.
Here are short
lyrics and long narratives, poems about ballads, baton twirling,
hound dogs, Shelley, and NASCAR stars. In “A Refusal
to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona,”
she writes about a memorial T-shirt, “his face folded,
half / in love with asphalt death.” Fire Baton announces
the debut of a talented new poet of wit, vivacity, and color.
And no matter how far she roams, she never lets us forget
her roots, that she comes from a place “where where’s
whirr.”
“Fire
Baton is an immense achievement. Here is wit acid and
sweet, angry and gentle, tonic and forgiving. Every line shines
with the excellence of poetic craft. . . . Hadaway’s
satire is deceptive in its strength. If you think you feel
a pinprick, better look again. It may be a bullet hole.”
—Fred
Chappell, author of Backsass: Poems
“Elizabeth
Hadaway’s Fire Baton is formally elegant, yet
effortlessly sassy and vernacular at the same time. In poem
after poem, she proves herself place-proud without a trace
of the provincial, and she’s exactly what a poet should
be—smart and passionate.”
—Gregory
Orr, author of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of
the Beloved
Elizabeth
Leigh Palmer Hadaway lives in Kingsvill, Maryland.
She was an instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University
and worked as an historical interpreter at Agecroft Hall in
Richmond, Virginia. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford
University and has received scholarships to the Breadloaf
and Sewanee writer’s conferences.
September
2006
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 80 pages
$16.00 paper
1-55728-824-0 (978-1-55728-824-0)
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