Description

 

no mother but the sky

by D. Walsh Gilbert

In no mother but the sky, a poet talks about how poetry comes to her. The forces of her natural world surround each lyrical moment, encouraging them to invoke inspiration and creativity. By paying special attention to her backyard landscape and listening for the voices of the ordinary creatures of the forest, a poet finds the “snuffles” which produce the magic. Here, one poet asks her fellow writers to join her—to “pick up a quill.” She recalls her own journeys, her starts and re-starts, accomplishments and failures, and builds together with her community of fellow writers and readers. This collection is about belonging and continuing and praising what is discovered “among the waking ladybugs.”

 

Early Praise

In these marvelous poems of landscape and alchemy, the poet finds mystery within the ordinary and breathes it into language. Alive to the magic of the natural world, she conjures prisms of wisdom from mole hills, rainwater, “weedy tangle/ and black mud.” The world outside her doorstep expands in the poet’s vision, as in the poem “Eventide,” when “The silhouettes of gloaming trees begin/ to become ancestor, myth, pools of hidden ink.” In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert reveals the enchantment one can find within our ordinary, extraordinary everyday world…if only we know how to look.

—Ginny Lowe Connors, author of White Sail at Midnight 

In her wonderful chapbook, no mother but the sky, that puts together poems about writing and the natural world, Gilbert has “patiently waited for [her] senses to grow sharper” to see a world “full of magic things” (from an epigraph by W.B. Yeats to “The Drink”). These are poems deeply connected to the earth which Gilbert knows is the source of poetry; the poet here is like a blind mole who cultivates smells into words, then language into poems that come from deep underground to create “some place new.” This poet doesn’t simply name the world around her—her naming (and the diction and images here are as precise and fresh as one could ask for) is an act of paying attention because she knows the world deserves our attention, is an unasked for gift that is, in its loved uniqueness, magically alive in its “once-ness.” And, magically, Gilbert’s work helps our senses to grow sharper.

—Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City

In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert has gifted the world a gem of landscape and recipe, purslane and milkweed, willow bark and ars poetica, feathered by seasons of hard clay and the thrum of things born anew. In these pages, she offers us the call to “cut/ little slivers through the veil of fog,” and “to follow what’s been beaten down/ by creatures and mystery” into the “wild howling ache” of the landscape. She conjures the poet working, showing up and stepping towards “all luminous remembering.” Her deft rendering of poet as cultivator, as earth-stirrer, evokes Heaney’s famed line, squat pen resting between finger and thumb, saying, “I’ll dig with it.”

—Scott Frey, author of Heavy Metal Nursing, winner of the 2024 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry

About the Author

D. Walsh Gilbert is a dual citizen of the United States of America and the Republic of Ireland. Her poetry collections include Ransom, imagine the small bones, Finches in Kilmainham,  Misneach: A Story of Kidnap, Enslavement, and Colonialism, and  From the Altar of the Land (all, Grayson Books), Once the Earth had Two Moons (Cerasus Poetry), [M]AR[Y] (Kelsay Books), Deirdre (Impspired) and Bleat & Prattle (Clare Songbirds Publishing House). Her poems appear widely in poetry journals online and in print. She serves on the board of the Riverwood Poetry Series and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review published by the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Gilbert lives in Farmington, Connecticut on a former sheep farm at the foot of Talcott Mountain near the watershed of the Farmington River, previously the homelands of the Tunxis and Sukiaugk peoples and near the oldest site of human occupation in Connecticut, dating back 12,500 years. She welcomes turkey, bear, and bobcat as daily visitors from the forest behind her home, writes every day, and visits her family in County Monaghan, Ireland as often as possible.

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/debra.gilbert.71697/

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BlueSky:  @dwalshgilbert.bsky.social