Once It Stops

THE AUTHOR: Florence Fogelin

EDITOR: Jeffrey Haste

PUBLISHER: Deerbrook Editions, PO Box 542, Cumberland, Maine 04021

SUMMARY: A poetry book has no plot, but I hope mine shows a journey from mid-life travails to an embrace of married love and life itself, ending with “I will not eat the berry that’s been counted/ sooner than I’d live life one day at a time.” I celebrate greediness for the present and for the future.

BACK STORY: I began writing poetry as a child of 50 years, with intermittent publication in journals — and a chapbook, Facing the Light, in 2001. I published soon after beginning to write poetry, then publication became rare. Still I found new joy in reading poetry as a poet (so different from being just a reader) and kept at my writing. I intend my poetry to be accessible and — as other poets have said — “to say what I mean and mean much more.” I have lived with a philosopher for 60 years, and I hope and pray that it shows in my work.

WHY THIS TITLE? “Once It Stops” is the title poem and is a rather gloomy evocation of driving home after a major snowstorm, suffocating in its softness. The title also evokes thoughts about the fragility of love and of life, concentrated especially in the final section, with poems entitled “Forget and Forgive,’ “Finale,” “In Black,” and “The Boathouse: A Love Poem” — “a demolition job” and “a kind of shared therapy.”

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Poetry should evoke emotion without being emotional; we turn to it out of a need for words, often at pivotal times in life. We don’t want to participate in another’s experience (that’s for a novel), we want to relate the poem to our own thoughts: “what oft was thought and ne’er so well expressed.”

REVIEWS:

“Wise, worldly, and deft at connecting unlikely yet fascinating topics – perhaps as a reminder that poetry has no problem with String Theory” — Florence Fogelin is a graduate of Duke, with a master s from Yale.” — Foreword Reviews.

“Fogelin’s poems amaze with range; her voracious intelligence encompasses stinging societal critiques: “Washington’s smooth face expresses a way to remember,/a why to forget”; and “slouching, buttless boys who somehow manage/to keep their pants on” and beauty: “a farm house . . . hangs by a thread of wood smoke” the philosophical and cosmic, high and low: an “up-thrust middle finger . . . outlasts a pope.” Compassion and fearless self-implication balance her dark wit: “I lifted up the scab and peeked/to see the future.” –April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music and Event Boundaries (Four Way Books).

‘”Once It Stops’ is a heady mix of the erudite and the quotidian. It is a mixture of the precisely observed natural world and the deeply philosophical questioning of how that world exists and is perceived that animates the writing. She says: “I claim as home any place I choose to be. / Never having belonged, / I love not belonging.” She also finds herself in deeply human connections. In “Window Washing,” the physical act becomes a metaphor for all that remains unspoken between lovers. What Florence Fogelin is doing is vital: playful, psychologically insightful, and startlingly precise. Fogelin is the real deal; she delights in the worlds we are given, and the words that let us sing of them.” — David Allen Sullivan, author of Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, and Black Ice.

AUTHOR PROFILE: The last page of my book, Once It Stops

c.v. of a poet

It only seems

that I have not been

in a single line of work:

student, teacher, historian,

mother, management-trainee,

writer, editor,

mistress

of the classroom, a college, many kitchens,

wife, lover, friend.

Always a translator

of English into English.

LOCAL OUTLETS:

Norwich Bookstore, Main Street, Norwich, VT 05055

Dartmouth Bookstore: 33 Main Street, Hanover, NH 03755

OTHER OUTLETS:  Amazon, or contact the publisher

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: ffogelin@gmail.com