Seed Across Snow

by Kathleen Driskell

Just as spring struggles to break through late winter, in Kathleen Driskell's new poetry collection, Seed Across Snow , understanding attempts to thaw untended griefs, long dormant. In colorful lyric and complex narrative, Driskell's poems center on recent tragedies surrounding her family's home in an old church rumored to be a neighbor nearly killed while fetching her mail, a girl abducted and left for dead on the highway behind her house, the drownings of two boys in a local creek. Poems are bound, too, with old sorrows from her past. Each memory that surfaces while living in the old church with its small graveyard next door, reminds that the most sacred, the family, is also the most fragile.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

Reviews

[Red Hen Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as spring struggles to break through late winter, in Kathleen Driskell’s new poetry collection, Seed Across Snow, understanding attempts to thaw untended griefs, long dormant. With her husband and two children, poet and teacher Kathleen lives in an old country church built before The Civil War. After beginning the renovation of her new home, she soon discovered the church was rumored to be haunted, along with a handful of other marked spots in their rural community. The area’s legends are rooted in a nearby train trestle where several teen-agers have fallen to their deaths over past decades.

Indeed, her community does seem to be inhabited by dark spirits. Driskell’s home and neighbors are the subjects of the poems in her new collection of poems, Seed Across Snow.
“Overture,” a collage poem, introduces the book and is filled with images that serve as a preface for the poems that follow. In colorful lyric and complex narrative, Driskell’s poems center on the recent tragedies surrounding her family’s home in an old church rumored to be haunted—a neighbor nearly killed while fetching her mail, a girl abducted and left for dead on the highway behind her house, the drownings of two boys in a local creek. Poems are bound, too, with old sorrows from her past. Each memory that surfaces while living in the old church with its small graveyard next door, reminds that the most sacred, the family, is also the most fragile.

[Avery Guess · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far I really enjoyed New Dog, Old Dog, Small Town Jury, Blue Canoe, Remarriage, Our Neighbor's Flock of Peacocks Wander Over for Another Visit, A Woman Once Gave Us a Hamper, and The Nude Model.

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review