The Eastern Washington University community is invited to celebrate the release of a new book written by an EWU creative writing instructor. Polly Buckingham will read from her new collection of poetry, The River People, at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 8. The event, which is sponsored by the MFA at EWU, can be viewed live on YouTube.
About the Autor
Polly Buckingham, an instructor at Eastern Washington University for 20 years, is author of The River People (Lost Horse Press), The Expense of a View (Katherine Anne Porter Prize) and A Year of Silence (Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award), and is recipient of a Washington Artists Trust fellowship. Her work appears in the Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of StringTown magazine and press. Polly teaches creative writing and is the editor of Willow Springs magazine.
“Polly Buckingham’s terse lyrics, semi-biographical journeys and glittering elegies, rich with the surreal fabric of nightmare and dream, open in the mind strange doors through which affection, fear, grief, playfulness, and wonder enter the world. In Potting Roses, she tells us: ‘I suppose this is the peace/after a summer rain/ when mist rises above the roses/and the white faces/of angels dissipate.’ The River People offers dozens of such moments, all of them crafted by a mature emotional and technical range rarely found in first collections of poems, and I am grateful that this book now lives and breathes among us.”
Christopher Howell
“It’s about time a book of Polly Buckingham’s striking poems has come out, to join with her award-winning fiction. The poems have been around for years and are gathered here in a delightful first collection. Although her work falls in with surrealists like Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the poems are nailed down by crystal clear imagery. ‘After You’re Gone’ is typical, starting with ‘I’m standing in the refrigerator light/pouring water into a blue glass/when a white van pulls up.’ In poem after poem, the mystery builds. A fine introduction to an original and serious poet.”
Peter Meinke
