Puckerbrush Press

Of Claiming, Patricia Ranzoni writes: "Learning how I've descended from Mayflower passengers, then Cromwell's Scottish deportees, "witches" and clergy, revolutionary patriots and loyalists, farming and seafaring families, woodsmen and women, papermakers, schooled and unschooled musicians and artists from coastal, upriver, and downeast Maine; and how I was honored in the womb with Native lullabies by a Penobscot Nation Medicine Man, Ii see why I could no more keep from claiming the rhythms rising from eleven generations of life in Maine territory than I imagine any other creature long here could. That knowledge being the whole of my qualification to try to write this place as I have known it, one of many Maines, into poems. Having no greater hope for this collection (ordered here more by season and story than when written) than to help record and testify to my people's language and ways, I offer Claiming--from first native folks notes to recent, more practiced pieces--as regional voice: from as well as about.

"Patricia Ranzoni's words? They look like home to me. Sound like home. Feel like home. Where and what else in all this world would be worth calling home, but here in these poeple-ly pages?"--Caroyln Chute

In this unique example of the printer's craft, each square page is free, and reads like this:

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

Dead of Winter, poems by Michael McMahon, continues the distinctive voice of McMahon's first collection, A Day's Work, published by Puckerbrush Press in 1976. It is a New England voice seemingly diffident but in reality memorable in its tenaciousness. New England is once again the scene, and winter the season, New England's quintessential season. They are poems in black and white, like trees in a snowy landscape.

In 1958, at the beginning of Constance Hunting's career as a poet, William Carlos Williams said of her After the Stravinsky Concert, "Something clicked for me and when that happens I hope I have sense enough to recognize it as a rare occurrence." In the decades since, Hunting has offered us a series of such rare moments. Like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Hunting has devoted her life to shaping a relatively slim but perfectly crafted ouevre. Her work ranges from imagist lyrics to a verse novella; and in the extended meditative poems of her recent years Hunting has created a mode -- witty, playful, but probingly reflective -- that is distinctively her own.

"Constance Hunting is surely one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century--a poet whose poems become myths as one reads them. The places she writes of are dream palaces where we guess something happened long ago and cannot be forgotten."—May Sarton

[To order, write Puckerbrush Press, 76 Main Street, Orono, ME 04473. As was Constance Hunting's practice, we will send your books with an invoice (including shipping and handling as USPS media).]

[To order, write Puckerbrush Press, 76 Main Street, Orono, ME 04473. As was Constance Hunting's practice, we will send your books with an invoice (including shipping and handling as USPS media). Proceeds from book sales go in part to the Miranda Goulden Special Needs Trust.]