New Love
Our intentions to be wise, abandoned ribbons
hung from the trees for a May wedding.
Sweetly tattered, another piece of the blindness
Nature is. And now, who are we? Simple bodies
singing to each other through darkness.
In the morning, love is apparent.
Raw wool on the branches the sheep
herd through on their way to water.
ISBN 1-59661-036-0
25 pages/$9
Eluard said that “There is another world and it is in this one.” These poems find
that other world inside the everyday of cooking and mothering and just getting by.
Sitting in a church and disregarding the priest as a distraction from the quiet and
the candles, music, and how scars turn to light, loving and remembering, her past as
a professional blues singer, and a transmutation of the blues into the silky lyrics
of a seamless voice—all these and sometimes a sharp wit that reins in the heart gone
too far.
—Doug Anderson, author of The Moon Reflected Fire and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police
Fierce in her honesty and embrace of experience, Kerry O’Keefe writes with calm,
heart-breaking authority of what it is really like to love. Her tough-minded
lyrics are shorn of sentimentality, yet full of tenderness. Each one is an
illumination, expertly crafted, direct and yet mysterious. We’ve been waiting
a long time for the voice in these stunning poems: it’s the voice of an adult
woman who knows how our hunger for life feeds us, how our failures can make our
survival shine.
—Joan Larkin, author of Cold River
Kerry O’Keefe grew up in Connecticut on the Long Island Sound. She received a B.A. from Trinity College and for a decade was a professional singer. Now she is solely a writer. She works for the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages, and runs a writing group from her home. She lives in Northampton with her two children, Grace and Gus, and recently has begun to sing again.