Pine Row Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-1963110128
Susannah Winters Simpson’s poems are lush narratives, offering the reader scenes of individual and collective life in locations from Key West to Afghanistan and points in between.
The landscapes are presences in their own right, and the line between land and one’s person is blurred, as in the poem entitled, “I Become the Landscape.”
Like mangroves’ root system, an ebb
and flow filtered upstate well water,
sulfur from my veins, exchanged
and left this brackish tidal pool.
Gumbo limbo peeled its red bark,
my Irish skin in imitation burned,
thinned & sloughed.
The Susquehanna River likewise becomes a visitor who leaves a calling card, and “Flight, Tuesday” gives the reader an atmospheric view of both sides of the Continental Divide, from which the speaker says she “felt my tears drift both East and West.”
….I saw the ley lines (X marks the spot) on the Four Corners
and Sedona. Below me, green sway of sugar cane, mirrored Everglades and the
rainbow film floating out from Sugarland factories….
This transcendence of space and time continues in persona poems written in the voices of Rachel Carson and Zelda Fitzgerald. Other famous names appear throughout the book, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Picasso, Walt Whitman, and Donald Hall.
In “Donald Hall Comes for Tea and Warns Against the Evils of Poetry Readings,” Donald says he is the one,
…who recoils at fatuous praise from other
poets or those jockeying onto the horse nearest the finish line. I am the one
who wonders: Why am I listening politely to this dreck?…
I would return home aggrieved from a reading and
find Jane at the wide wooden table, afternoon sun on her hair, writing.
Ordinary people may be found here, too: ratcatchers, nuns, poets, and even an imagined daughter. Again, reality’s boundaries grow thin as these verses sense and describe all manner of human ills. Many of these poems are about addiction, trauma, death, grief, and loss, but they are also filled with extraordinary beauty that sits alongside its somber sisters.
There is also no dearth of good humor in this book. The poet presents us with “Rules for Writing Poetry,” beginning with:
First, one must bitterly disagree with then disappoint one’s parents often.
This should involve wearing thrift store clothing and sleeping with a string
of unsavory lovers, some of whom should be brought home for the holidays,
and when the lover is drunk, he urinates in your brother’s closet thinking
It is the bathroom, one will have the beginnings, just the stirrings of a fine
poem.
Mother Wind is full of spirit, buoyant with it, a must-read for anyone who enjoys entering a new world with each poem and luxuriating in words and images.
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Susannah Winters Simpson’s work has been published in: North American Review, Potomac, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Xavier Review among others, and her poems have been anthologized in Full Moon and Foxglove by Three Drops Press, UK., Fierce Words from the Intangible World(SoFloPoJo),and Beyond Words: Women. Life.
She has published four poetry collections, Geography of Love & Exile (Cervena Barva Press/2016), Mother Wind (2024 Pine Row Press/2024), Dharma of Death & Desire (2024/Shanti Arts Press).and her fourth collection, Blue Agape is forthcoming from Fernwood Press/2025
Susannah is a hospice nurse, facilitates therapeutic writing groups for substance abuse treatment centers and is the Founder and Co-Director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Monthly Reading Series.
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Reviewer Judy Ireland is the author of Cement Shoes (2013), a poetry collection that won the Sinclair Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Coe Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England. She is a Poetry Editor & Reading Series Producer for the South Florida Poetry Journal, Co-Director of Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches, and she teaches at Palm Beach State College.
Lightwood 