To see Peggy’s 2012 FootHills chapbook, Teacups in the Mud, click here.
From the book:
Susquehanna River in the Street
Rowboats where cars should be.
A yapping dog struggles while a boy
fights to hold on without tipping over.
A flowered couch floats by.
People lean from other windows
voices pitched high.
Straight across, wide cardboard begs
HELP I’M SICK, letters smeared
from rain still falling.
Clouds the colors of spoons, of concrete,
of shadows, hang like water balloons,
like jelly bags full of purple grapes,
low and lower. Beside me on a chair
piles of little white paper squares
to cover numbers on bingo cards.
I'd torn along all perforations, amusement
through long dark hours while grown-ups
pondered what to do next.
I had no reason to be afraid; I was with
Mom and my Aunts, even Grandma
for their weekly ritual in the second floor
room above Bixby's Dry Goods.
Bingo come hell or high water.
I couldn't be left home alone.
Baby-sitter not in our vocabulary.
As windows went black, I nestled
on a pallet of their coats, the linger
of moth balls in my nose, secure
among those who came to the game tonight
hoping to beat the odds.
Peggy Seely’s desire to become a published poet began when her uncle, a type-setter for the Times Leader newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, PA (her birth-place) printed one of her childhood poems: “The lovely Spring season is finally here,
the sky is so blue, so bright and clear...”etc.
Fortunately she began to read and read and read, thus learning from Robert Frost, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Peter Meinke, Natasha Trethewey and many others.
Three quotes in particular have guided her evolution as a poet:
“Poetry begins when not only the reader but also the author starts wondering whether it is poetry.” Vera Pavlova
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.” Thomas Babington Macaulay
“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: as much neurosis as the child can bear.” W. H. Auden
Wrestling the Ghosts
is an 88 page hand-sewn paperbook with spine. $16.00
To order by mail click here.
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