I've enjoyed NDR's website and am delighted to participate. The two poems are from Mortal Benediction, a manuscript that's been a finalist for the Green Rose Prize and most recently, The Brittingham and Felix Pollack Prizes in Poetry.
          "Stanton Moor" appears in the book's first section among poems which explore both real and psychic landscapes--those I visited during my stay in England and those places that impressed themselves on my imagination (Dublin, for instance, as result of my longstanding Joyce fascination and my brothers' report of sighting my double during a visit to that city; Akhmatova's Russia, and so on). Stanton Moor is thought to be a prehistoric ritual center and the site includes a ring of standing stones as well as a network of ruined cairns. The rugged stretch of land with its ceremonial remains seemed to be a physical embodiment of the tension between life and death, something I intuitively understood as a pregnant woman who saw her marriage was rapidly disintegrating. Although I had abandoned my ambitions for a brilliant career as shutterbabe years before, I photographed Stanton Moor regularly, hoping to capture the bleak atmosphere on film and to convey something of its mystery.
          "Clamor" appears in the third section of Mortal Benediction, among poems that explore the dangers and rewards of erotic love. Metaphors of exile and war have particular resonance--I grew up outside of Andrews Air Force Base, where my father served as a reservist in "The Congressional Wing." My mother, daughter of Irish emigrants, was born in England in the early days of the World War II and her earliest memories are of the neighborhood bombshelter and adults reciting poetry against the whine of engines overhead. The poem draws on Hans Magnus Enzenberger's essay "Europe in Ruins" and a dream sequence where the clamor of love exists in dramatic counterpoint to life under siege.

Autobiographical Commentary
          Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers' Publishing House), my first poetry collection, was awarded the 2000 Towson University Prize for Literature. In recent years I've devoted equal attention to poetry and prose. I've always loved the essay--it's a form that accomodates lyric, narrative, and analytic impulses and thrives on tensions implicit in any fusion of these modes. Since I'm at work on Motherland, a nonfiction manuscript-in- progress that explores autobiography in relation to gender issues, I'll let some passages stand in for an autobiographical blurb:
          "At the end of a dry, cool English summer, I got on a plane in Manchester and brought my daughter home. The sharp-smelling, shining, Continental liner was a far cry from the Red Cross transport I'd made the journey on myself, a child in my mother's arms- -no seats, a twelve-hour flight, no way to warm milk. As we lifted up into the clearing sky, I didn't dare look down to where the terraces of the troubled city dropped into the green grey scrubland of the northern moors. I didn't want to watch--again--the distance grow between myself and my motherland.
          Despite my birth in my mother's hometown of Corby, a small steel town in the otherwise sleepy county of Northamptonshire, I'd grown up an American. Because I'd never lived in Britain for an extended period of time, my connection to my homeland had dwindled over the years. In college, I studied English literature like archaeology, as if by reading I could uncover the image hoard of a landscape I'd learned by exile but had inherited by birth. So when the opportunity presented itself, I took a year off teaching to finish a poetry manuscript while my husband taught on a Fulbright exchange at a British secondary school."

          From "Motherland," 2000 winner of Crab Orchard Review's John Guyon Award in Literary Nonfiction.

          During my daughter's first year, I was struggling--as new mothers do--to balance writing, teaching, and motherhood and surprisingly, I found myself fleshing out whole scenes rather than stanzas. Mortal Benediction and a series of interlocking essays that fuse autobiography with reflection on literary and popular culture have evolved hand-in- hand.

          "On that visit to Haworth Parsonage, I was too exhausted to make the trek to Top Withens, the ruined homestead purported to be the original for Wuthering Heights, turning back from the path that energized and inspired the Brontes and the youthful Sylvia Plath. Someday, in the unimagined future, in the dead of winter, my own house in ruins, I will find myself bent over an open notebook. Candles drift shadows across the wall and there is a voice, measures I love in my ear. Words hang fire, there is static on the line. My dreams are bad timing, missed connections, exile under darkening skies, I starve. His tongue searching my mouth, the mouth of my body, these moments I am most lost, most self-possessed. I bend to kiss his quaking thigh, lick along this landscape's ecstatic length. Hours elapse, conversations, constellations of couplings, the shape of all I want, it seems, to swallow. Then, at last, I wake, rush to feed the baby, negotiate traffic, meet classes. Someone in the passing crowd wants my attention; the babyminder's brought my daughter at the end of a long day's work. She is only three months, impatient, hungry, trying to take it all in, grasps and pulls at the sign the more fanatical students have hung on the wall which reads: Choose life."

From "Another Country," Massachusetts Review, Summer 1999 Winner, 1998 Heekin Foundation Cuchulain Prize for Rhetoric in the Essay

          These days, I'm at work on essays that map connections between significant autobiographical events and larger cultural issues. Althorp, Diana Spencer's ancestral home, for instance, is about 35 miles from my own humble birthplace in Northamptonshire. Parallels between the lives of two at opposite ends of the economic scale found their way into "Double Exposure," (forthcoming in Pennsylvania English). Musically, I'm learning about techno and trance, and hope the styles and energies of these forms will find a way into poems and prose which merge my historical interests with contemporary concerns.