The Will - Softcover

Dora Beale Polk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0955656206 ISBN 13: 9780955656200

Publisher: Orlandon Press, 2008

This book is a collection of Polk's life's work as a poet. These are poems about time and life, in all senses. There are poems about personal experience: the break-up of relationships, the strains of daily living, the experience of aging. Poems about the passage of time and the nature of consciousness, about history, politics and memory. The variety of themes is expressed in an equally wide range of forms, including narrative, humour and philosophy. This is a deeply thoughtful poet celebrating over a long lifetime her freedom to write with no care to fashion or trend, revelling in the power and right of poetry to examine anything and everything. Particularly key to Polk's work is her belief in the vital importance of intention and choice, that at the heart of our lives is will.

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Review:

Polk has a startling ability to address vast themes in a straight-forward, heart-felt way, in poems that openly express her views without in any way imposing them. The reader is simply invited to contemplate. You are certainly not asked to swallow her opinions. You, too, have a Will and it is your responsibility to use it well. Polk does not need to convert you, for she is an example of that wondrous paradox: if you are sure of your beliefs, you can be open to difference and to constant re-evaluation. Polk's passion for ideas is matched by her love of language, of the sound as well as the meaning of words. Her Welsh roots give her an affinity with the sound-chiming of the Welsh cynghanedd, the easy use of assonance, alliteration and internal rhyming ('Word Harmonies'), which resonates throughout this collection. It is delicately subtle: 'Buds spill their petals across the/lawn before our very eyes, lapping and/dissolving into hips and haws.' (Lateland). And her use of rhythm is extraordinary: in Grass, you can just see the prairie grasses moving in the wind. Her wry and rueful humour, which portrays a lover as a fridge 'full of tacky leftovers' or as a 'damp,unlighted freeway', shines forth. 'The Will' is a legacy to cherish, a rich fund of images, sensations and ideas that pulse with immediacy and yet will endure. --Suzy Ceulan Hughes

About the Author:

Dora Beale Polk was born in Pontnewydd, Monmouthshire, and went to school in Pontypool. She was at college in Cardiff during World War II, taught English and was very active in the Labour party. She moved to Colorado for a year, married and has lived in America ever since. She comes back to Britain every year. She pursued Celtic studies for an MFA and PhD at the University of California, Irvine, taught literature and creative writing for more than twenty years at California State University at Long Beach and is now Emeritus Professor. She became active in Democratic politics while living in the States. Besides teaching, she has worked as a secretary to a labour union leader, staff writer for a national farm organization, and speechwriter and campaign aide to a U.S. Senator. She has published a number of popular suspense novels as well as academic works. Her previously published works include 'The Island of California: a History of the Myth', 'A Book Called Hiraeth', 'Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision' and 'Something Must Be Done'. Though many of her early poems have been published in journals, this is the first time they have been published as a collection.

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