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hush
Rosemerry’s poetry speaks to our hearts, to our deepest knowing, to being here in each moment. She wakes us up again and again and reminds us that the sacred is right in front of us—in the night sky, in the moist earth, in the leaf at our feet. To be awake in this moment is our deepest potential; these poems bring us here with reverence and joy. Like all great teachers, Rosemerry points the way so clearly that we arrive, having forgotten the finger, and seeing only the moon.
—Susie Harrington, meditation teacher, Desert Dharma
With Hush , Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer once again turns her attention toward insights gleaned from daily life, trusting that everything we encounter, from evergreens and bluebonnets to snapdragons and an achy back after shoveling snow, has something to teach us about being human. Throughout each of these exquisite, open-hearted, often sensual poems, she brings us along as she finds a kind of "renegade beauty" wherever she looks. "Let's go outside," she writes, "and praise/the light till the light is gone, and then praise the dark," modeling for us just the kind of radical gratitude we need in our literature, and in our lives right now.
--James Crews, editor of Healing the Poems of Kindness and Connection
These are not quiet poems—they are forthright meditations on truth and courage, love and loss. They are life itself, revealed with compassion and grace. The poems in Hush speak like a healing meditation, a reminder of the beauty and sustenance in living with hearts and minds open.
—Susan J. Tweit, plant biologist and author of Walking Nature Home
In these quietly rendered poems, we are invited into the garden, and further into the wilderness—and find ourselves giving praise for that which is mud smudged and lumpy, for the sincerity of wild strawberries, and for the onslaught, which every gardener knows. Here Rosemerry shows us how one might endeavor to be the peace we want in the world. One comes away remembering that tending is at the heart of all healing. Because thorn bush. Because great blue heron. Because puddles.
—Wendy Videlock, author of Nevertheless
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine , TEDx, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been described as “a deep oasis for all who seek to experience the sacred in every moment.” Her most recent collection, Naked for Tea, was a finalist for the Able Muse Poetry Prize. Other recent books include Even Now, The Miracle Already Happening and The Less I Hold . She’s included in the acclaimed anthology, Poetry of An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems , and leads mindfulness poetry discussion groups.
She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate (2019). Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, thriving/failure and daily life. She’s performed and taught poetry for Think 360, Craig Hospital, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Weehawken Arts, Camp Coca Cola, meditation retreats (with Susie Harrington), 12-step recovery programs, hospice, Deepak Chopra, Shyft, and many other organizations.
She is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-host of the Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes), and co-leader of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). Though she earned an MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison, she still can’t effectively pair socks.
Favorite one-word Adjust.
—Susie Harrington, meditation teacher, Desert Dharma
With Hush , Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer once again turns her attention toward insights gleaned from daily life, trusting that everything we encounter, from evergreens and bluebonnets to snapdragons and an achy back after shoveling snow, has something to teach us about being human. Throughout each of these exquisite, open-hearted, often sensual poems, she brings us along as she finds a kind of "renegade beauty" wherever she looks. "Let's go outside," she writes, "and praise/the light till the light is gone, and then praise the dark," modeling for us just the kind of radical gratitude we need in our literature, and in our lives right now.
--James Crews, editor of Healing the Poems of Kindness and Connection
These are not quiet poems—they are forthright meditations on truth and courage, love and loss. They are life itself, revealed with compassion and grace. The poems in Hush speak like a healing meditation, a reminder of the beauty and sustenance in living with hearts and minds open.
—Susan J. Tweit, plant biologist and author of Walking Nature Home
In these quietly rendered poems, we are invited into the garden, and further into the wilderness—and find ourselves giving praise for that which is mud smudged and lumpy, for the sincerity of wild strawberries, and for the onslaught, which every gardener knows. Here Rosemerry shows us how one might endeavor to be the peace we want in the world. One comes away remembering that tending is at the heart of all healing. Because thorn bush. Because great blue heron. Because puddles.
—Wendy Videlock, author of Nevertheless
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine , TEDx, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been described as “a deep oasis for all who seek to experience the sacred in every moment.” Her most recent collection, Naked for Tea, was a finalist for the Able Muse Poetry Prize. Other recent books include Even Now, The Miracle Already Happening and The Less I Hold . She’s included in the acclaimed anthology, Poetry of An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems , and leads mindfulness poetry discussion groups.
She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate (2019). Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, thriving/failure and daily life. She’s performed and taught poetry for Think 360, Craig Hospital, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Weehawken Arts, Camp Coca Cola, meditation retreats (with Susie Harrington), 12-step recovery programs, hospice, Deepak Chopra, Shyft, and many other organizations.
She is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-host of the Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes), and co-leader of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). Though she earned an MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison, she still can’t effectively pair socks.
Favorite one-word Adjust.
- GenresPoetry
114 pages, Paperback
Published May 16, 2020
2 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
About the author
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
26 books103 followersRosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Rosemerry has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006. Find her daily poems on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practice, and her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. Her most recent collection is The Unfolding.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 5, 2021
These poems were so positive, I got that feeling reading them that I get when I pour too much maple syrup on my pancakes. Sweet and delicious. She appreciates the moment, and I am worried about the future. It was fun to forget about the future for a short time.
December 16, 2022
Have I found a new favorite poet?? Full of so much wisdom, tenderness, and insight, I loved this collection so much.
July 21, 2020
Reading this book of poetry is like being on a quiet retreat in the woods. (Ahhhh!) This book is the rain, the ground, the river, the moon, the berry bush.
There’s a line in here that reads, "Sometimes I forget the trees. It’s embarrassing to admit.” That’s me, the reader. I get so obsessed spinning on my hamster wheel of things-to-do that I forget all about the startling and beautiful world of nature. Thank goodness for Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, beckoning me out!
“Hush” is a reminder to love, appreciate, and bask in the natural world. In one poem, Rosemerry talks about wanting to show her son the “marvel” of it all, but he is at the "the precise age where beauty is boring.” Instead, she shows the wonder of it to her own child self. But of course, she is also showing us!
This book is a leisurely walk with Rosemerry as she gently points things out. “Do you see this? Do you see?”
And, even after I turn the very last page, I’m not bereft of all that natural beauty. I’m left with the heron, that hummingbird beak, some whispers of a thorn bush, enormous frozen angel halos, a field of bluebonnets — all the gifts this poet planted in me and nurtured, unknowingly.
What a beautiful, beautiful book!
There’s a line in here that reads, "Sometimes I forget the trees. It’s embarrassing to admit.” That’s me, the reader. I get so obsessed spinning on my hamster wheel of things-to-do that I forget all about the startling and beautiful world of nature. Thank goodness for Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, beckoning me out!
“Hush” is a reminder to love, appreciate, and bask in the natural world. In one poem, Rosemerry talks about wanting to show her son the “marvel” of it all, but he is at the "the precise age where beauty is boring.” Instead, she shows the wonder of it to her own child self. But of course, she is also showing us!
This book is a leisurely walk with Rosemerry as she gently points things out. “Do you see this? Do you see?”
And, even after I turn the very last page, I’m not bereft of all that natural beauty. I’m left with the heron, that hummingbird beak, some whispers of a thorn bush, enormous frozen angel halos, a field of bluebonnets — all the gifts this poet planted in me and nurtured, unknowingly.
What a beautiful, beautiful book!
July 22, 2020
For those of you who go outside to both find and lose yourself, this collection of poems is for you! Penned with reverence and attention to the lessons learned from her garden, from the larkspurs and bluebonnets, to the rivers, trees, mountains and mesas, Rosemary wraps her arms around this sweet planet we call home. She paints the pages with metaphors so personal the reader cannot avoid being touched by her compassion, love and sensitivity for all that is. Exploring both our brokenness and our beauty, her optimism and hope shine through by reflecting upon our need for stillness, thus giving the reader not only permission to weep, but to openly rejoice. With her lips to the earth and kneeling in the dirt, Rosemerry Whatola Trommer truly is a daughter of the trees and an inspirational poet.
December 20, 2020
The devotional lyrics of Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s HUSH seek to “ask bigger questions,” “to see not / what makes things different, but / / what makes things the same.” After all, “everything is a flower,” a flowering! Wahtola Trommer, “tethered to this very here,” is a “student of buds,” “teaching us,” by her very fine example, to “put down our arguments with ourselves,” “shed every layer of should,” “give into who we are,” and “say yes” to the “marvels wearing ordinary clothes.” Everything is “worthy / / of attention.” To read Wahtola Trommer’s poems is to “escape all those little / rules” and “lean into the immensity” of “the joy that comes when all the lines we thought we knew have been erased.” Read these poems, Dear Reader, and some of the light of “brazen hope,” “some / of the shine reaches into you”! -Jami Macarty
August 3, 2020
I’m a fairly recent and delighted convert to Rosemerry’s poetic spirituality and I adore this new gathering of poems. When this world can seem too loud, too contentious and heart wrenching (as in NOW), these gently powerful poems take me to the great stillness beneath where nature unfolds in its everyday, amazing way...awaiting notice...which is this poet’s finely-tuned gift. Hush is a prescription to not only notice, but to allow and appreciate our own vulnerability as we live from the courage of the heart. Take 2-3 poems daily to stir that inner soul essence seeking sunlight and a spacious sky. As Rosemerry reminds, “There are wings in us/we’ve forgotten.”
June 15, 2020
A beautiful collection, filled with love, natural imagery, and even a bit of humor.
September 17, 2021
Stunning! Thank you, Rosemerry. Your poems are true gems.
April 13, 2025
To me, it seems that far too many literary magazines fill their pages these days with "poetry" overtly concerned with politics, race, gender, and a host of other in-your-face topics, presented in strange forms, with wild – often shocking – language as their basis.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's hush is the antithesis of that which I have just described. As I read through the pages, I developed a sense of having desperately called the author on the phone, simply asking, "Is it okay if we just go for a walk today?" Trommer's poems invite you to slow down, to observe, to stop, to feel, to breathe, to step away from the big world out there, to stand in simple moments, and then to calmly breathe yet again.
My hiking boots were not on when I read this, nor were my hands shoved deep within the pockets of a jacket, but it was almost as if I could feel the elevated, cold, thin air of an autumn walk in Colorado as I was flipping the pages: a very welcome difference from street protests on TV news and online name-calling in the name of politics.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's hush is the antithesis of that which I have just described. As I read through the pages, I developed a sense of having desperately called the author on the phone, simply asking, "Is it okay if we just go for a walk today?" Trommer's poems invite you to slow down, to observe, to stop, to feel, to breathe, to step away from the big world out there, to stand in simple moments, and then to calmly breathe yet again.
My hiking boots were not on when I read this, nor were my hands shoved deep within the pockets of a jacket, but it was almost as if I could feel the elevated, cold, thin air of an autumn walk in Colorado as I was flipping the pages: a very welcome difference from street protests on TV news and online name-calling in the name of politics.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews