This poetic journey from Jamestown, Virginia, to Muir Woods, California, sings of the triumphs and tragedies woven into the fabric of the landscape.
"Elizabeth Spencer Spragins truly is in touch with ancient bards and the glorious music of the incantations of druidic sisters in her collection The Language of Bones. Roaming the geography and history of America, these verses hark back to the British and Celtic ancestry of the original European settlers."
~David Anthony Sam is the award-winning author of Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson, as well as Final Inventory and three other collections.
"The Southeast, Southwest and Far North are all fertile ground for Ms. Spragins' incisive commentary and poetic exploration of authentic events, the land, and its peoples. This bold collection offers a variety of lyrical pieces, both graceful and beautiful, as well as harder-edged fare meant to convey some of our natural world's challenges, and history's harsher character and consequences."
~Steven P. Pody, author of The Panoptikon
Professional Reviews
Joanna D. Catron:
When poet, writer and editor Elizabeth Spencer Spragins of Fredericksburg travels the globe, her antennae are tuned to sacred echoes in the natural and manmade world, the consequences of which are the very personal and lyrical Celtic verse forms that spring from her fertile mind. Her poetry is so sparing and yet so rich with imagery that it takes more words to define what a bardic verse is than what it takes for her to construct one. Belmont, Gari Melchers Home and Studio, has inspired evocative poems which appear in two of her latest publications, "The Language of Bones; American Journeys Through Bardic Verse" and "With No Bridle for the Breeze," both published in 2019.
Upon learning of the discovery of dinosaur prints in the garden paving stones at Belmont, Spragins composed Thunder Lizards, written in a class of bardic verse from the 14th-century Welsh poetic form called a Cyhydedd Hir:
"Thunder Lizards"
Winter solstice burns Rocks among the ferns. Canny eye discerns A print unknown.
As the day unseams, Reptiles rove my dreams Olden jungle teems With beasts that hone
Tooth and claw on fright. Sunset slants the light; Phantoms fade from sight In search of bone,
Children run unshod, Armed with goldenrod- Thunder lizards trod Upon this stone.
The poems in "With No Bridle for the Breeze" are based on the tanka form, which originated in seventh-century Japan. Tanka are defined as untitled five-line poems that pivot on the third line, and they typically have syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7 or less. The pivot line concludes an “upper poem” and also begins a “lower poem.” Tanka usually contain no capitalization, and punctuation is limited to an occasional dash. This collection breaks with tradition by including a title for each poem.
Gari Melchers’ Studio at Belmont, still lovingly preserved with a fine collection of the artist’s paintings, furnishings and tools, inspired elegant lines that, despite the temporal vacancy of the room, evoke the lingering presence of the famous painter and the daydreams of the poet:
"The Vacant Studio"
the spattered sill sags beneath a box of brushes- heart of pine splinters into so many colors in the darkness of my dreams
Spragins has memorialized many other familiar local sites, such as Fairview Beach, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Chatham, Appomattox Courthouse, the Rappahannock River and much further afield!
Still Living on my Feet is the follow up to Tichaona Chinyelu’s first book, In the Whirlwind, which was rooted in a sense of hard-hitting revolutionary black love. However, in this sophomore effort, Tichaona brings the revolutionary essence from deep
