Description
Garden Clippings
by Cynthia Storrs
Paper
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Cynthia Storrs‘ poems detail the nature, gardens, and greenery around her, describing in vibrant language and colors the transitions, losses, and faith which fill her world. Using fresh images and experimenting with form and playful rhyme, blossoms become crowns, hillsides transform to vegetables, dying tulips reform into withering hands, while family and pets puddle under Tennessee’s relentless summer heat. Storrs employs the lens of nature to bring focus on the tangles of life which encompass us all, and plants in her readers a hope for next year’s harvest. #poetry#nature#life
Pax ~ Gratia ~ Caritas
Cynthia Storrs is a poet, teacher, and cross-culture lecturer. She and her husband reared two children overseas in French schools while working with national churches and teaching English. Her award-winning poetry has appeared on-line and in print in magazines and anthologies. In addition to writing, she is an amateur painter and regularly incorporates her love for art in ekphrastic poetry. Storrs currently resides with her husband Don and their dog Rustee outside of Nashville where they are attempting to tame their backyard into a garden.
Kevin Maines –
GARDEN CLIPPINGS, by Cynthia Storrs, welcomes the reader to share the joy and trepidation of nature, as we witness the connectedness of-and-between plants, humans, and other species (trout, stink bugs!, a raccoon…). She describes the subtle trust between the planter and the planted, each hoping for just the right amount of sun, soft rain, and resolve. Storrs, who is also an artist, paints a ground (or surface) for the delicate textures she introduces. Even dandelions deserve a beautiful mention: “millions of suns swaying on seas of green / preparing for flight.”
Dying tulips are “twisted into grotesque purple stars.” “Cheek to cheek, like a midnight dance.”
“A sea of red stood at salute” (a sonnet). “Fireworks in Fall” (a series of couplets). A few villanelle variations. In addition to these delightful forms and figures of speech, Storrs has done a splendid job with poetic mimicking: “The Garden of Colorado Springs” is a marvelous rendition of William Butler Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” (“I will arise and go now, to Garden of the Gods.”) This book becomes a stunning way of seeing life through the eyes of an accomplished poet. I must confess I have a particular fondness for Storrs’ poem “Tea in Tennessee,” for I, too, am a “homesick, mountain-missing girl in Tennessee.”
–Carol L. Deering, author of Havoc & Solace: Poems from the Inland West, and This Passage: Poems.
Laura Stuckey –
Cynthia Storrs, an artist as well as a poet, brings an ekphrastic touch to this collection of garden-inspired poetry. The landscape in these poems abounds with light, color, form, and movement. The narrator speaks from the edges of the frame, distilling key moments of love, aging, and loss against the garden’s regenerative backdrop. There is a subtle yet insistent strength in this collection.
–Laura Stuckey, Teacher and Poet
Michele Phoenix –
Cynthia Storrs‘ Garden Clippings is a heartful collection of redemptive reflections. Inspired by the colors, vitality, and growth cycles of ordinary garden elements, Storrs paints a deeply human contemplation of life, love, and grief with words that are at once accessible and transcendent. Her enchantment with the symbolism of nature’s common beauty is at once curious and contagious—”One must not forget the promise in a frozen garden plot.” Garden Clippings belongs on the shelf of anyone who delights in the subtle artistry of fields and flower beds.
–Michele Phoenix, author, two-time Christy Award finalist.