CELTICLADY'S REVIEWS: If the SKy Won't Have Me by Anne Leigh Parrish Book Tour!

The poems in If The Sky Won’t Have Me weave a brilliant tapestry of the human condition, focusing on nature, the female experience, family drama, aging, politics, and regret. Images of water feature strongly, as do rebirth and regeneration, both physical and spiritual. A perfect sequel to the author’s debut collection, the moon won’t be dared, these poems expand and deepen our understanding of what it means to be alive in a complex world.

Advance Praise:

Award-winning novelist Anne Leigh Parrish doubles down on her provocative debut poetry collection the moon won’t be dared with a new book of resonant and deeply emotional poems. If The Sky Won’t Have Me echoes with themes of love gained and lost, including relationships with family and the environment, through every stage of a woman’s growth. Recurring images of nature and water link the poems, culminating with the title poem where the poet craves rebirth in water: “If the sky won’t have me, ... / I’ll stay just until clouds gather, / Rain falls again & I release myself once more.” If The Sky Won’t Have Me is filled with ringing poetic images that often read like personal parables and leave the reader wanting more. – Terry Tierney, author of The Poet’s Garage

Satisfying. Brilliant. Necessary. A beautiful and masterfully written collection of poems whose words evoke a sense of movement that beckons us back to the page and to the places we belong. – Loic Ekinga, author of How to Wake a Butterfly

Politics and Poetry

My poems sometimes take a political turn. My prose seldom does, and if so, it tends to be less blunt, more circumspect. Confined in real-world time and place, the plot of a story or novel will address what concerns me, particularly the plight of women, but always as part of the larger picture made necessary by the edicts of good fiction. Another way of saying this is that the people I write about are more important than their challenges. Their complexity, the extent to which they live on the page and are recognizable as human beings matters more than a particular worry or challenge. Otherwise, the work can become heavy-handed and didactic.

In poetry, as in fiction, the goal is to keep the reader close enough to influence their understanding. But there are very few limitations on how this can be done. The freedom to play with language, ideas, images, everything really, is liberating. I have license to tell it like it is, in other words.

My second poetry collection, If The Sky Won’t Have Me, is a blend of nature writing, meditations on getting older, marriage, and humanity in general. That last is a wide topic, but I’ll tell you exactly what I mean. Take a look at the poem “It Never Did.”

A man, no,

A woman, no,

In this case it doesn’t matter

Just a humanoid

Bipedal, knows how to

Use a tool

Start a fire

Share a language

Not a Neanderthal, it’s thought they couldn’t

Grasp symbols or sing their children to sleep

Only Homo sapiens did all that

So, anyway, this human, this person with an erect spine

Lives in a cave, litters the floor with bones, old

Tools, pelts, bits of jewelry they get sick of

Or which make them think of someone gone, dead

Then tires of the dark, soot, damp or dust

Confined like that, only leaving to hunt,

Or haul water, tiresome routines

Variety is the spice of life, even then

So, he/she/they venture miles afield,

Into the light of a burning sun,

To find a screaming mob in pursuit of

A fleeing victim & standing unobserved roots

For the punishment the crowd will give,

Then roots for the victim to escape

& back they/she/he goes into the cave

To wait for people to claim reason over rage

Friendship over hate &

Madness to pass but it never did, did it?

This is my take on early humans arranged in competing tribes. The imminent violence one person witnesses causes a mixed reaction. One moment they want the larger group to succeed, the next, their heart goes out to the victim.

The poem is about a mob and what mobs do, how they persecute and punish. Our history is full of such moments. It’s also full of people standing by and doing nothing, observing, waiting for the outcome.

The last line makes clear my position that we’ve not come so far from where we began, because the madness of hate is very much alive.

Today’s climate of woke culture is another point of concern. Wokism is about language and who gets to say what about whom. All liberal agendas aside, it’s censorship. For a writer, censorship is intellectual death, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to live in a truly censored country, that is, where violating the rules resulted in being jailed or killed. Freedom of expression is a relatively new concept in the history of the human race, and many writers and artists had to find a way to thrive without putting some ruler’s nose out of joint. What if fairy tales and myths were a way of doing this? How better to hide what’s important than to have stories about things that seem to carry no real weight?

“Trick The Prying Eye”

To censor is to transubstantiate

Freedom into slavery

War into peace

Orwell said so

Blood is the raven’s wing

What’s shed, the fallen feather

The birth of symbolism, the rise

Of subtext in centuries of words

Was to trick the prying eye to close

Or at least to look away

Consider fables & fairy tales

Legends & myths in that light

The wolf in the wood is the

Brutal king, the girl with the basket,

His kingdom

See how firmly we’re held

By hidden truth

Story by story

But the question remains: Who gets to say who can write what, and about whom? I think that’s best left to the artist, not someone wanting to push a political agenda that claims to be fair and isn’t.

My poems reflect my politics and I’m proud of both.

Anne Leigh Parrish is the author of nine previously published books: A Winter Night (Unsolicited Press 2021); What Nell Dreams, a novella & stories (Unsolicited Press, 2020); Maggie’s Ruse, a novel, (Unsolicited Press, 2017); The Amendment, a novel (Unsolicited Press, 2017); Women Within, a novel (Black Rose Writing, 2017); By the Wayside, stories (Unsolicited Press, 2017); What Is Found, What Is Lost, a novel (She Writes Press, 2014); Our Love Could Light The World, stories (She Writes Press, 2013); and All The Roads That Lead From Home, stories (Press 53, 2011). Visit her website.

Link to the book on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75676110-if-the-sky-won-t-have-me

Link to the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/40lWUcv

Link to Unsolicited Press: https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/store/p407/iftheskywonthaveme.html

Tour Schedule

April 4: BooksParlour (review)

April 6: The Booklover’s Boudoir (review)

April 12: Wall-to-Wall Books (review)

April 14: A Bookish Way of Life (review)

April 17: CelticLady's Reviews (guest post)

April 19: Armed with a Book (interview)

April 21: Impressions in Ink (review)

April 26: True Book Addict (review)