Tending

by Laura Grace Weldon

This collection casts an uncommonly bright glow. Wonders are found in topics rarely addressed by poets: window washers, archaeologists, cows, rutabagas, lost overcoats. The beauty of ordinary lives are revealed with what one reviewer calls radical empathy.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2013

About the author

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of the poetry collections Portals (Middle Creek, 2021), Blackbird (Grayson Books, 2019), and Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013), as well as a handbook of alternative education, Free Range Learning (Hohm Press, 2010).

She lives on Bit of Earth Farm where she works as an editor, community educator, and marginally useful farm wench. Her writing appears in mainstream as well as literary publications, and she blogs about learning and mindful living at Relentless Optimism. She's Laura Euphoria on Pinterest. She's EarnestDrollery on Twitter. And she's on Facebook too often.

Reviews

[William Guerrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the feeling of dropping the needle onto a new album. Some of the tracks will be familiar already, thanks to radio, and others will be new, like unexpected gifts.

Laura Grace Weldon’s volume Tending, is like that. The words are chosen and arranged beautifully–the images uniformly delightful. Some are songs I recognize and others are fresh and unfamiliar, their authenticity validated by the truth of those familiar.

I’ve never been a teenage girl with an imaginary boyfriend, but I have stretched to reach a distant blackberry (the best ones are always the farthest away), briers grabbing my clothes and tearing my face. I’ve learned from experience, as she has, how to hold the bowl when you stumble.

I never learned tea party manners, but I have baled hay deep into the night, enjoying the satisfaction that comes from a long hard day sweating in a field with one’s children. Those days are in my past now, but I nod in agreement when I read: “even swallowing this day/I couldn’t feel more whole.”

I’ve never seen a window washer reading poetry while dangling from a skyscraper, but I have been moved to prayer at the sight of a CAFO.

And I think it’s like prayer
to farm, mindful
that plants and animals
need to be exactly where they are,
seeing as nature is God drawing circles
for us to learn the shape of things.

And, increasingly these days, I too am

weary of those who talk
in slogans stamped and packed
by someone else, like
long distance truckers paid to drive
without knowing the weight
hauled onto that dark highway.

Yes, well said, I think, smiling at the reminder of a tractor in a hay field “circling ever inward,” and journeys that “trace all the way back to blessed dirt.” And likewise at the image of some future archaeologist discovering the truth of the aluminum salesman’s pitch.

This is a record whose grooves deserve to be well worn.

[Virginia Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This lovely volume introduced me to Laura Grace Weldon's poetry. What an eye she has for seeing inside our everyday lives! It's like Weldon hands me a pair of glasses that suddenly improve my vision! These poems are accessible, inviting and worth multiple readings.