Home Place [Paperback]

Linda Caldwell's poems skillfully uncover the treasures of place and the people who tend it. The poems in Home Place reveal a speaker in tune with the land, and the reader is transported to this place where gone things whisper. Linda Caldwell is a poet truly at home with the music of the poetic line and the art of storytelling. Her collection connects us to generations of wisdom and poignantly reminds us that ghosts are always with us as we live on resurrected ground. Tina Parker, author of Mother May I and Another Offering

*** In Flagwoman on a Dangerous Curve, Linda Caldwell creates an apt metaphor for the poet of this collection, caught /between the world of cars and animals /and the world where / gone things whisper. Caldwell is a keen observer and unsentimental describer of her rural world, who also senses the presence of ghosts through objects they touched and remembered scenes overlaid on present experiences. Her farm has both sunlight balancing / on spiny cedar needles and a dead calf's bloody skin hung over an orphan's back in hopes of persuading a cow to nurse it. Several poems are tender and powerful elegies for the beloved father whose desertion assaults her as she opens a gate, placing fingers where yours marked/the cold dew on steel. Honoring her ancestry and the old people, the first people, she understands that both figuratively and literally, from springs and wells / we drink their bones. Caldwell's imagery is sharp and often surprising, from the skimmed milk blue of kitchen walls to desires that trundle, one after the other / like steers lured by the scent of salt. With beautiful language, she draws readers into a world where Blue light pastes thin limbs / against the sky and the past swallows tomorrow. Barbara Wade, author of Inside Passage

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Linda Caldwell is a poet and playwright living on a farm near Paint Lick, Kentucky. She has received two grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has publishelãq