Thunderhead

by Daye Phillippo

The lyric poems in Daye Phillippo's radiant debut collection Thunderhead explore faith, motherhood, family, and community. As the author has put it, she has lived her life ""backwards,"" first raising a large family, then going back to school, and only now seeing her work find its way into print. Rooted in Midwestern farm country near where she grew up, these place-based poems reflect a spiritual searching for--and expecting to find--the sacred in the ordinary world of trees and weeds and seasons. Here you will find red-rooted pigweed and red-wing blackbirds, cornfields, woods, streams, gardens, and the creatures (human and otherwise) who inhabit them, in addition to a wide night sky filled with stars, and the ancient underground river, the Teays, that throbs and flows beneath them all. During a thunderstorm, Phillippo ""what if, / in choosing words to ponder we choose / our countenance, too?"" The poems in this collection offer us not only a compelling self-portrait, but a mirror in which we may better see who we are and might become.

86 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2020

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems is a gem. Daye Phillippo has captured the "terroir" of the midwest. A theme of seeing the present through the eyes of the past brings a particular depth and richness to many of the poems.