I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth by Cathy Hailey

$15.99

 

Cathy Hailey’s venturesome book combines the crystalline image of haiku with the sonnet’s classic lyricism. Her poem ‘In Closing’ says, “There’s magic in condensing, / precision in expressing.” Magic is the right word when tradition and innovation spark new life into poetry. Clarity and prosody, East and West, formalism and liberation, all come together in I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth. There’s nothing more beautiful than harmony on the page.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

 

When you settle in to experience the dance of Cathy Hailey’s words, images, and symbols in her collection, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, you will not only feel like you’re an audience member of a deeply moving ballet – the poet’s form bringing words to life – but you will also be transfixed by the way her lyric poems show us life in all its complexity, beauty, and heartache. The ballet within the ballet reveals the richness between art and life: glimpses into Hailey’s own family relationships, rich in ancestry and love but also in grief, as well as meditations on nature and our connection to Earth’s creatures, and even the tragedy of so much loss of life due to the pandemic. Through the movement of Hailey’s poems, we feel how all of us – all of creation – are connected, how art helps us transcend sadness, and how beauty – like the sun – rises each morning, as we carry on in life’s great dance.

–Kathy Cable Smaltz, Poet Laureate, Emerita, Prince William County, VA

 

 

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I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth

by Cathy Hailey

$15.99, paper

979-8-88838-081-9

2023

I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth features ekphrastic poems inspired by an episodic performance of the Moscow Festival Ballet interwoven with poems of refuge from grief, the comfort and healing found in nature, memory, and family. The poems are an exploration of mimesis in Aristotle’s sense, a re-representing of life–a witnessing and re-animation of the lives of all creatures in nature–the biosphere, the artistic life as performed on stage in the ballet, the spiritual life beyond, and a hope that illuminating the interconnectedness of all can bring about a renewed consciousness. I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is a venture into the haiku sonnet, a hybrid form combining eastern and western poetic styles.

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct lecturer in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County (PWC), Virginia. She is Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV) and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in The New Verse News, Poetry Virginia, Written in Arlington, Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State (Vol. 2), Poetry for Ukraine (THE POET), Family (THE POET), and NoVA Bards. Poems are forthcoming in The Poetry Society of Virginia Centennial Anthology.

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