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CROW SONGS
from Cyberwit Press $15.00 Description: In a culture that celebrates youth, CROW SONGS by Jane Ellen Glasser gives voice to life’s last chapter, acknowledging the challenges of aging but also the benefits of leisure to explore the inner life and an aesthetic of beauty that time does not diminish. She discredits the stereotypical image of elderly women, turning a phrase like “old crow” into a trope worthy of contemplation. And she defies picturing the last years as an affliction of loneliness. To Glasser being alone is to be rich in her own company after a life of being responsible for and answerable to others. Glasser does not shy away from looking death in the face to measure the vitality and importance of what years have been given and what years that are left to praise the gift of a long life. |
Early Reviews of Crow Songs
In Jane Ellen Glasser's latest book: Crow Songs, the wisdom, intelligence and heart of this older woman is a gift to you in the songs of her beautifully crafted poems. She is not afraid to embrace her many crow qualities, sharing the too often not seen or felt moments lost amidst our endless busyness and noise. You will be lifted with her poems into seeing "ordinary" nature transformed into a spiritual moment, being calmed by acceptance of aging, and opening to heartbreaking losses in life yet able to go on with gratefulness. This book will change your life."
Mary-Jean Kledzik
Author of As If Wine Could Pour from Her Nipple
A splendid collection of new poems by Jane Ellen Glasser is at once lush, wise and heartbreaking. So much depends and how we take a walk, what we inhale, touch and see. This is the essence of Crow Songs and the poet’s life in Lighthouse Point, Florida. In her hands an ordinary street blooms golden yellow with Tabebuia blossoms. The evocative force of her imagery is everywhere, from Pompano Beach where she stands “filling with human shame” in the midst of bottles and plastic cups caught between mangrove roots to her description of an old dog’s life in a no-kill shelter. But these poems inevitably belong to the old crow, aging and facing the prospect of death. How many more times, she asks, will a cup of coffee lift her into the day, how many more times will her daughter call just to hear her breathe. The male image of death she dismisses, imagining instead the kindness and compassion of the feminine. The book ends with “Praise Be,” a fitting tribute to Crow Songs.
Mary McCue, author of Raising the Blinds
In Jane Ellen Glasser's latest book: Crow Songs, the wisdom, intelligence and heart of this older woman is a gift to you in the songs of her beautifully crafted poems. She is not afraid to embrace her many crow qualities, sharing the too often not seen or felt moments lost amidst our endless busyness and noise. You will be lifted with her poems into seeing "ordinary" nature transformed into a spiritual moment, being calmed by acceptance of aging, and opening to heartbreaking losses in life yet able to go on with gratefulness. This book will change your life."
Mary-Jean Kledzik
Author of As If Wine Could Pour from Her Nipple
A splendid collection of new poems by Jane Ellen Glasser is at once lush, wise and heartbreaking. So much depends and how we take a walk, what we inhale, touch and see. This is the essence of Crow Songs and the poet’s life in Lighthouse Point, Florida. In her hands an ordinary street blooms golden yellow with Tabebuia blossoms. The evocative force of her imagery is everywhere, from Pompano Beach where she stands “filling with human shame” in the midst of bottles and plastic cups caught between mangrove roots to her description of an old dog’s life in a no-kill shelter. But these poems inevitably belong to the old crow, aging and facing the prospect of death. How many more times, she asks, will a cup of coffee lift her into the day, how many more times will her daughter call just to hear her breathe. The male image of death she dismisses, imagining instead the kindness and compassion of the feminine. The book ends with “Praise Be,” a fitting tribute to Crow Songs.
Mary McCue, author of Raising the Blinds
Review of Crow Songs by Jane Ellen Glasser
Perhaps you might consider this latest collection of magnificent poems by Jane Ellen Glasser to be a training manual for the ways in which, as you walk through life, you will learn how to allow yourself to be open and accepting of the world around you. Divided into five sections, Glasser begins the first with a lesson on how to get the most out of a long walk. In the following sections, she goes on to show us how to appreciate the beauty in nature, the perils (and pluses) of aging, how she has come to love solitude, and finally, her brave and beautiful acceptance of death.
Because there is no way for me to show you, the reader, how wonderful Glasser’s words are, I’ve decided to quote my favorite lines for you.
Here is the first: In Instructions for a Long Walk, she tells us to:
Empty the storage house
in your brain
so that your senses
can fill with everything
that is not you.
Then, in Nature Unmasked, we envision, in language that is so vivid and evocative, exactly what Glasser has drawn for us.
a murder of crows,
free as the flapping
scarves of their wings,
sipped the wind
with opened beaks;
In Time’s Erasures, I love how Glasser begins with the erasures:
and memory stumbles
backwards through a forest
searching for bread crumbs.
But then, and perhaps because I can totally empathize with what Glasser is saying in this poem, I find her turning the erasures totally on their heads, so that only after the nonsense in our lives is erased, can we accept what pleases ourselves.
I am disappearing bit by bit,
cleaning house by getting rid
of tyrannical clocks, mirrors
with their facile judgments,
evicting boarders, Should
and Must, until the only one
left to please is me.
After describing the scenery she passes on her walk, Glasser ends her poem, Why I Walk Alone, with these lines:
Sometimes, images
transpose into words. I tuck them into
a pocket. If I’m lucky, when I’m home
they form themselves into a poem.
And in this: Requiem Twenty-Five Years Later
In memory of my daughter Jessica (May 18, 1974—May 24, 1996),
There was no time for tears
so she stored them in the reliquary of my heart.
I can’t help but imagine how full the reliquary of Jane Ellen Glasser’s heart is; how, along with the tears, it is full of love and beauty. And how lucky we are to be on the receiving end of all this glorious poetry.
Jacquie Herz, author of The Circumference of Silence
Perhaps you might consider this latest collection of magnificent poems by Jane Ellen Glasser to be a training manual for the ways in which, as you walk through life, you will learn how to allow yourself to be open and accepting of the world around you. Divided into five sections, Glasser begins the first with a lesson on how to get the most out of a long walk. In the following sections, she goes on to show us how to appreciate the beauty in nature, the perils (and pluses) of aging, how she has come to love solitude, and finally, her brave and beautiful acceptance of death.
Because there is no way for me to show you, the reader, how wonderful Glasser’s words are, I’ve decided to quote my favorite lines for you.
Here is the first: In Instructions for a Long Walk, she tells us to:
Empty the storage house
in your brain
so that your senses
can fill with everything
that is not you.
Then, in Nature Unmasked, we envision, in language that is so vivid and evocative, exactly what Glasser has drawn for us.
a murder of crows,
free as the flapping
scarves of their wings,
sipped the wind
with opened beaks;
In Time’s Erasures, I love how Glasser begins with the erasures:
and memory stumbles
backwards through a forest
searching for bread crumbs.
But then, and perhaps because I can totally empathize with what Glasser is saying in this poem, I find her turning the erasures totally on their heads, so that only after the nonsense in our lives is erased, can we accept what pleases ourselves.
I am disappearing bit by bit,
cleaning house by getting rid
of tyrannical clocks, mirrors
with their facile judgments,
evicting boarders, Should
and Must, until the only one
left to please is me.
After describing the scenery she passes on her walk, Glasser ends her poem, Why I Walk Alone, with these lines:
Sometimes, images
transpose into words. I tuck them into
a pocket. If I’m lucky, when I’m home
they form themselves into a poem.
And in this: Requiem Twenty-Five Years Later
In memory of my daughter Jessica (May 18, 1974—May 24, 1996),
There was no time for tears
so she stored them in the reliquary of my heart.
I can’t help but imagine how full the reliquary of Jane Ellen Glasser’s heart is; how, along with the tears, it is full of love and beauty. And how lucky we are to be on the receiving end of all this glorious poetry.
Jacquie Herz, author of The Circumference of Silence