Pruning Burning Bushes

by Sarah M. Wells

Overview

In pruning, a decision must be made whether to "either slowly hollow, heartwood rotting outward, / or grow from green into a fiery blaze in autumn." Pruning Burning Bushes is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of the natural and spiritual worlds with the personal and familial worlds. The book wrestles with this decision--to grow or to rot. Walking from the valley to the highest summit and back down into the depths of the canyon riverbed, the poems travel through the author's childhood filled with family and farm life, new marriage life, and subsequent miscarriages, the births of her children and deaths of relatives, and walking in the quiet waters of faith, sometimes raging and sometimes rejoicing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630879136
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	866 KB

About the Author

Sarah M. Wells serves as the Administrative Director of the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University, where she is also Managing Editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and the Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Alimentum, Ascent, Christianity&Literature, JAMA, Measure, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, River Teeth, Rock&Sling, and elsewhere. Her essay "Those Summers, These Days" was included as a notable essay in the next Best American Essays anthology. She lives with her husband and three children in Ashland, Ohio. You follower Sarah at www.sarahmwells.com.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Cascade Valley xi

I Excavating 1

Angry 3

Climbing the American Metal Playground Slide 4

Ohio 5

The Pigs 7

Instructions for the Excavator 9

Junctions 10

Consider the Sparrows 11

Sifted As Wheat 12

Jesus Walks into a Bar 13

Predator 14

Levi, After the City of Shechem 16

Riding After Winter 18

Honky-Tonk Bride 19

II The Need to Be Filled 21

Harvesting Raspberries 23

The Bottom Dwellers 24

Making the Bed 25

Traveler 27

D&C (Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep) 28

Assailants 29

My Baby Sister 30

The Milking Room 31

Thunder 33

Rain Dance 34

Measuring Rings 35

Pruning Burning Bushes 36

III Driftwood 37

Dent de Lion 39

Crater 40

Driftwood 41

Singing Birds 42

Last Born 43

Ten Reasons Why He Didn't Die 44

Aware 47

Grandfather Dying 48

Expiration Date 49

The Japanese Maple 51

The Antique Rocking Chair 52

IV Sunday Worship 55

Daylily 57

Sunday Worship 58

A Christmas Poem 60

Pancakes 62

Hymn of Skin 64

In the violent center 66

Woven and Spun 68

Union 69

Casa Blanca Lily 70

The ladies' quilting club is out today 71

My Mother's Kitchen 72

Interference 73

Creek Walk 75

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Wells has been granted—and she knows it—the grace to eat life right down to the seed, where the joy of the mystery lies, and the peace that passes understanding. Deft and inventive with strict form, with ambitious narrative, and with the poignant perspective that, when called for, comes of becoming a small child, Wells equally thrives on the merest simplisms of faith, on the densest meditation, and above all on her experience of full humanity, turning all to stunningly cogent advantage."
—Sydney Lea, author of Six Sundays Toward a Seventh

"Where Suburbans 'honk and veer' behind a neighbor's combine and Jesus walks into a bar to play pool with farmers, the poems of Sarah Wells study those juxtapositions of the urban and the rural, the wild and the agrarian which we live with in this country often without noticing. She notices and responds with the empathy of Theodore Roethke for the vulnerable non-human world and the visionary understanding of St. John of Patmos who knew a sign when he saw one. It is a pleasure to read a book of poetry dedicated to 'spirits reckless with praise and the need to be filled.'"
—Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

"Sarah Wells's droll, evocative title perfectly fits her collection of poems, a series of 'double exposures' that superimpose the biblical on a background of rural Ohio. On that quilt-like ground, individual poems rich in the specifics of their time and place offer scenes from married life and motherhood, aging, and the process of accepting (but not erasing) inevitable losses . . . This is a book to savor, not in haste but slowly, so as to enjoy the unobtrusive rightness of the language, the mature but unjaded view of the human condition, the depth under the playfulness."
—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Her Place in These Designs

"Pruning Burning Bushes balances Wells's spiritual life with humor; there's the bawdy life of carnivals and yet a true spiritual practice mixed harmoniously in. The personality of the author comes through attractively."
—Sandra McPherson, author of Expectation Days

Editorial Reviews

"Wells has been granted—and she knows it—the grace to eat life right down to the seed, where the joy of the mystery lies, and the peace that passes understanding. Deft and inventive with strict form, with ambitious narrative, and with the poignant perspective that, when called for, comes of becoming a small child, Wells equally thrives on the merest simplisms of faith, on the densest meditation, and above all on her experience of full humanity, turning all to stunningly cogent advantage."
—Sydney Lea, author of Six Sundays Toward a Seventh

"Where Suburbans 'honk and veer' behind a neighbor's combine and Jesus walks into a bar to play pool with farmers, the poems of Sarah Wells study those juxtapositions of the urban and the rural, the wild and the agrarian which we live with in this country often without noticing. She notices and responds with the empathy of Theodore Roethke for the vulnerable non-human world and the visionary understanding of St. John of Patmos who knew a sign when he saw one. It is a pleasure to read a book of poetry dedicated to 'spirits reckless with praise and the need to be filled.'"
—Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

"Sarah Wells's droll, evocative title perfectly fits her collection of poems, a series of 'double exposures' that superimpose the biblical on a background of rural Ohio. On that quilt-like ground, individual poems rich in the specifics of their time and place offer scenes from married life and motherhood, aging, and the process of accepting (but not erasing) inevitable losses . . . This is a book to savor, not in haste but slowly, so as to enjoy the unobtrusive rightness of the language, the mature but unjaded view of the human condition, the depth under the playfulness."
—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Her Place in These Designs

"Pruning Burning Bushes balances Wells's spiritual life with humor; there's the bawdy life of carnivals and yet a true spiritual practice mixed harmoniously in. The personality of the author comes through attractively."
—Sandra McPherson, author of Expectation Days

From the Publisher