To Fly Without Wings

  For a review of this book, see REVIEW  



To Fly Without Wings
Helicon Nine Editions, 2009
paperback, 106 pages
$9.95
plus $2.50 shipping

Helicon Nine Editions
PO Box 22412
Kansas City, MO 64113
or
Judy Ray
2033 E. 10th Street
Tucson, AZ 85719

Cover painting by Suzanne Stryk
 

 

Praise for To Fly Without Wings

"Wise and warm, dramatic and dedicated, Judy Ray's skilled poems of passion for justice and boldness for peace stand out among contemporary voices.  There's nothing she can't write about affectingly whether in small talk or shaped poem as she turns her past into our present."
                                                                                   -- F. D. Reeve

"Judy Ray is a true daughter of Mnemosyne, as one sees in such an exquisite memory poem as "Blue Cardigan," where every detail of scene and mood has been recaptured or never lost....The poems of To Fly Without Wings see with a fine descriptive eye, but also and always, as in the charming poem 'Evening," with compassion or joy."
                                                                            --Richard Wilbur

"There's a calm center in these sometimes playful and varied poems as Judy Ray guides us back to an English childhood with luminous family portraits, meditations on landscape and memory, the nature of matter, and tributes to worlds both perceived and imagined....Judy Ray is the real deal and I salute her."                                          -- Colette Inez
                                                                                

 
 

SEPTEMBER
              for Sam

Hoo hooo hoo hoo. Whose
name does this owl call
in another September?
From the cottonwood branch
two huge moon-eyes glow
and tufted ears splay
question marks of the night.

We tried to seal tight the September
well of darkness, let ivy memories
twine across the surface.
Then come razoring questions
from one who all these years
has carried secrets in her sad heart.
We look down again to where
light of understanding will never fall.

If he were with us now,
the owl calling all those other names
instead of his, wouldn't he bring
angel-haired children of his own
to wade the cold creek, then fall
asleep to the hoo hooo hoo hoo
of a great horned owl?
 
   

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