Rehearsal - Willis, Irene

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Résumé :
In her poignant new collection, Rehearsal, poet Irene Willis gifts us with a remarkable discovery-that to embrace the truths of dying is to celebrate life. In clear precise language, Willis enables us to share the couple's deep love shining through details of their days, to know that no matter one's age, the moment of death surprises. The book's second section deals with the after time, as in the remarkable poem titled Hers when she started to own her own life-that the loneliness of widowhood brings with it the strengths of independence. Blended in are poems of vivid childhood experience, her mother's aging time, exchanges with other poets. To read these poems by Irene Willis is to have one's own life enriched by her clarity of vision, her voice of wisdom and courage. -Charlotte Mandel, author of To Be The Daylight Each passing year of life, each new wrinkle of the skin, each hesitation of limbs and, above all, each loss of a loved one, is a preparation for what awaits us at the end of our lives' journeys. Nonetheless, the sojourn brings us glimpse of great joy, pride, musing, thrill, the pleasure of efficacy, lust, and yes, also sadness, defeat, shame, regret and remorse. Irene Willis offers us lexical snapshots taken along this bittersweet highway and does so with great eloquence and dignity. Salman Akhtar Author of Freshness of the Child (2018)

Biographie:
Irene Willis is a poet, writer and longtime educator who has taught at many schools and colleges. Before she ever published poetry, she co-authored a children's book and two volumes in a major textbook series with her first husband, the late Richard Willis. Years later, with psychoanalyst Arlene Kramer Richards, she co-authored four books for young adults. Her published poems began to appear in the 1970's, but it wasn't until 1995, after she had been awarded a Distinguished Artist fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, that her first full-length collection, They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida), appeared in print. Since then, she has published three more books of poems: At the Fortune Caf? (Snake Nation Press, 2005,) winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award and nominated for a National Book Award; Those Flames, a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize and released by Bay Oak Publishers, Ltd.(2009), and Reminder (Word Poetry, 2014). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had grants and awards from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Millay Colony for the Arts; the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Berkshire/Taconic Foundation. The holder of an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University and M.F.A. in Poetry from New England College, she is Poetry Editor of the web-based International Psychoanalysis, where her column Poetry Monday appears monthly. She is a member of the Authors' Guild, and an Educator Associate of the International Psychoanalytic Association.