Puckerbrush Press

Margaret Shipley's third collection of poems, written in her eighties, is luminous. Central to At Water's Edge is knowledge of change, which of course comes from time ("It comes. It goes. / It has gone") and the losses that accompany it. But change begins with the "first plunge / into language": "From then on,"  Shipley tells us, "there's danger of change. Beautiful danger of terrible change." The transformative power of language allows Shipley to carry a deep lesson of childhood ("A child who is denied the ripe fruit... / will go instead for the source") through an arc of passion and loss, to a deeply won ability to follow a muse "made of motion" into a resolving and elusive wisdom. Water is the appropriately central metaphor here; but unlike the woman in "Of Water" who "unforms / before anyone can embrace her," Shipley stands at water's edge, sometimes swimming back into the past, often looking into a deeper underworld, but ultimately, like the shards of her broken water jar, singing a "random song" that is, for her and for us, a "braver joy for the breaking."--Martha Collins

Hummer

Iridescent messenger of glut

from a thimble-sized world, avid for sweet,

your wingbeat counts on every thrust

of stiletto beak into honeysuckle throat

before autumn sends you flashing south

as the vine shouts its last vermilion.

Your orbit over our heads once gone

will leave us without crown or jewels,

glow or afterglow, like a queen

whose royal gems -- amethyst, ruby, topaz --

have been cached for a season of war

in velvet forgetfulness of the time

when stained-glass shards

fractured garden sunlight, and your

colorwheels spun in our summer air.