True Affections: Poems from a Small Town

by Elizabeth W. Garber, Louise Bourne (Illustrator)

........................Can you feel it -- the yearning to sail in a galloping wind, to narrowly miss treacherous ledges, to nuzzle a star-studded sea in the inhale and exhale of tides all night? -- from Inside the Winter Boathouse In True Poems from a Small Town Elizabeth Garber's long-awaited third collection of poems continues her exploration of a life well-lived in Maine. She begins with an epigraph from W.S. Merwin ( One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time ) signaling to her readers that these poems delve into the precarious nature of our time and how necessary it is to love who and what we love, fearlessly. Garber's poems are grounded in distinctive Maine the Spring return of the bobolinks, a deer swimming to an island in January, a ferry ride home from an island. She captures a variety of a tow truck driver, a mayor, and her mother dictating her obituary. In Garber's island poems, she gazes into the essence of an old spruce, sea urchin shells, and falls under the spell of milkweed in bloom. She takes us to a village in Ohio, from childhood to first love in a time of racial tensions and antiwar demonstrations, and continues the story decades later. She ends with a prose journey Down East to visit a dying friend. Some of her poems dare to lead us into discomforts we may try to forget, yet venturing into suffering and uncertainty, these poems lift us, helping us find solace for our own life.

103 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2012

About the author

Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of Sailing at the Edge of Disaster (2022 by Toad Hall Editions), Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect's Daughter (2018 with She Writes Press) and three books of poetry, True Affections: Poems from a Small Town (2012), Listening Inside the Dance (2005) and Pierced by the Seasons (2004). Three of her poems have been read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She was awarded writing fellowships at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming where she worked on her memoir. Garber studied Greek Epic in the Mythology and Folklore Department at Harvard, received a BA from Johns Hopkins, a MFA in creative non-fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Masters Program, and a Masters in Acupuncture from the Traditional Acupuncture Institute. She has maintained a private practice as an acupuncturist for nearly forty years in mid-coast Maine, where she raised her family.