Pandemic Lent: A Season in Poems by Jayne Moore Waldrop

 

With brevity and sensitivity, these daily haiku carry us through an unfolding tragedy, all the more delicately for their economy of words, and all the more effectively for their precision of image and feeling.

–Br. Paul Quenon, OCSO, author of Unquiet Vigil: New and Selected Poems and In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir 

 

With truly remarkable and arresting haiku, Waldrop leads us through the tumult of the early months of our global health crisis with sensitivity and insight.  Her valuable and succinct introduction explains how the poems grew out of her Lenten discipline for the season.  The work itself captures the foreboding of the siege of Covid-19, while effectively delineating the little details of a spring both natural and unnatural. A most unique daybook, it offers comfort and hope much as does the Christian ethos, never denying death but always averring new life and rebirth.  Or, as one of the finest pieces in this collection says, she gives us “prayers for peace and a path / through new wilderness.”  We need such paths more than ever and for Waldrop’s pointing a way we should all be grateful.

–Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House Press.

 

The world is still so/ beautiful writes Jayne Moore Waldrop in her enthralling new collection Pandemic Lent, A Season in Poems. Her petite entries, all but a few, offered as various forms of haiku, encapsulate the experiences and fears of so many of us during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and represent her promise of faith – to write daily. This collection will stand the test of time as a well-turned reminder of human resilience.

–Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, Author of A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen