Once I entered the poems, hers was the only world I was certain of. Each poem reads almost like a chapter in a novel. There is softness, strength, and sureness in Rosie’s tellings. Try to stop after reading and savoring just one poem; go ahead, I dare you! —Patrice Vecchione, Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination and Spirit in Everyday Life
Some nights you’re blessed
among trees
people you’ve never seen
mingle warmth from hand to hand
and melt
until they are beams of light woven into a rope
that tugs you in
where a man whose eyes sparkle into yours
lifts his young girl
this is my daughter
she puts her face close to yours
you say hello beauty
she smiles hello love
the light of day
the splash of water on your face
daffodils burning in their blue and white vase
the calendar open to two jays on a branch
it’s Spring
the first day
About the Book:
In Time and Peonies, Rosie King delves deeply into poems of family and childhood, the community of friends, loss and joy. She has become attuned to what Kenneth Rexroth calls luminous moments. Her poems are infused with a lucid abundance, a kindness and charity that enlarges the spirit. Even in the face of loss she salvages hope and courage— “and I’m filled again/with a crush of old sweetness/at how giving a moment can be as it vanishes.” These are poems that shine like river stones, polished by long immersion in the waters of the spirit.
—Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World, New and Selected Poems 1966–2006
About the Author:
Rosie King was born in Saginaw, Michigan. A graduate of Wellesley College, she came west in 1966 and did her master’s degree at San Francisco State and her doctorate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz where she taught beginning poets and wrote a dissertation on the poetry of H.D. Her poems have appeared in various journals, and four poems from her first book, Sweetwater, Saltwater (Hummingbird Press, 2007), and three from her second, Time and Peonies (Hummingbird Press, 2017) were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. When not traveling, she makes her home, with pond, fruit trees, and garden, near the beach in Santa Cruz.
