Cormorant on the Strand by Gloria Monaghan

“The natural world is to Gloria Monaghan something like we imagine it to have been for Dylan Thomas—a wellspring of image and a habitation for the wonder and absurdity, temporary solace and intimate cruelty in human life. Parting the ‘cavalier doors of past lives,’ she tracks ‘small stories under low clouds’ in poems about childhood in the Upper Midwest, its mossy culverts, wild meadows, creek beds, and lakeside pine. She also explores women’s instinct for survival, tracking her inheritance across generations to her great-grandmother, Maude, and the conviction that ‘a woman can do anything / if provoked enough.’ These poems provide backdrop for the crux of the collection, which is surviving romantic deception and revenants from one’s past. Here, the poet finds analogies in a suburban garden’s cycle of flourishing, inexplicable blight, decay, and renewal and in the platonic love of Monty Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, darlings of Hollywood cinema. ‘Why did we live in the screen?’ Taylor asks in one poem, a question that resonates in our own moment. Why indeed, when we can instead look for ‘the edges / of these places where things come together.’ Monaghan’s poems are a field guide for seeing our lives with tender clarity.” –Heather Treseler, author of Parturition