Every Easter weekend at our farm by the river
the bunny hid jellybeans.
My sister and I found them on dusty window sills,
behind the salt and pepper shakers, between
napkins in the wooden basket
on the long trestle table that was our grandmother’s.
We’d pop them quickly into our mouths—
sweet was rare in our family. After the hunt
I always went to church with my cousin Rachel.
I’d adorn myself in violet velveteen dress, white gloves,
white straw hat with the little veil.
My dad would take our picture,
waving among the irises running riot by the tractor shed.
Church made Easter more than just
chocolate binge followed by
inevitable egg salad. I felt like normal people
from a family that didn’t scream or throw dishes.
The church had stained-glass windows parading the Gospels.
During the sermon I studied the glass people—so tasteful,
halos in place, with hair
that didn’t frizz. Leaning on the balcony rail
I listened to the organ’s exaltation,
fell in love with church. I can’t unravel now
which god I was worshiping,
surely not the one who attended my wedding,
Father Perkin’s god who took my groom aside
and warned him not to wed a Protestant.
Nor was my childhood god the one who
shrugged his shoulders when my sister
lost a second child, as if to say
What do you expect me to do about it?
And not the god who assigned my dad to lose
his memories, pockets of his brain turned
holey, everything sifting through. So many
gods there are out there,
like the wild geese who filled the sky
flying home those Easter weekends when I was young.
Who can tell which god to pick to pray to,
or if our one true god will just know
how to find us where we hide?
ISBN 1-59661-128-6
54 pages/$9
There is a beautiful hush at the center of these poems.
Ingersoll’s calm, level tone lulls us into thinking they really
are the conventional vignettes of domestic life they appear to
be, but this is an illusion. In the still moments after reading,
we realize that we have witnessed flashes of terror, human
cruelty, nakedness. It’s as if a Vermeer interior became, on
second look, the screaming face of a portrait by Francis Bacon.
There is nothing gratuitous in these poems: each one feels thoroughly
lived in and, as they say, earned. Still, that hush at the center…
it must be the grace that only follows hard lessons. Wendy Ingersoll’s
poems are startling, brave, and lovely.
—Jeffrey Skinner
In the opening poem of this impressive debut, Wendy Ingersoll writes,
“I’ve been playing the Well Tempered in all the wrong keys.” What
follows is line after line of perfect pitch writing that is anything
but “well tempered.” Instead, Ingersoll explores the spectrum of human
emotions—at times angry, at other times joyous; at times sad, at
other times funny—in these well crafted memorable poems.
—Gerard LaFemina
In her poem, “Counterpoint,” musician and piano teacher Wendy Ingersoll
defines polyphony as “fragments of melody interweaving like / knit and
purl forming a scarf of sound.” It seems an apt metaphor for her first
collection, in which the end of a long marriage, the birth of a first
grandchild, a family’s struggles with alcoholism, aging parents, and
all the other fragments that together constitute the complex melody of
a woman’s life are played with tenderness and precision. Set against
the backdrop of the Eastern Shore’s skies teeming with birdlife above
a marshy landscape, these poems remind us that while loss and grief
are inevitable, it is grace that follows.
—Sue Ellen Thompson,
editor of The Autumn House Anthology
of Contemporary American Poetry
Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll’s chapbook River, Farm was published in 2005 by Bay Oak Publishers. Her poems have appeared in Caesura, Worcester Review, Potpourri, Controlled Burn, and The Broadkill Review. Contests include first place in the following: Milton Poetry Festival 2009, Delaware Literary Connection 2009 and 2008, Rehoboth Writers Guild 2007. She lives in Delaware and is a piano teacher, grandmother of four, and handbell ringer.