At Goat Hollow and Other Poems by Wilda Morris
Kelsay Books, 2023
This latest collection from Wilda Morris covers a lifetime. It lauds an important person in Morris’s life. It also gives glimpses into the life of the poet herself. Ms. Morris, her sister, and her mother resided, in a time past, in the same country house with Norman Weber and his wife Irene. Many of the poems address Norman or arrive in Norman’s voice. Morris presents the collection as a Memoriam to her cherished uncle and his wife.
Morris wields a strong poetic hand. She offers poems in free verse, but also scribes in refreshing forms that intrigue the reader. Not many poets, these days, offer the bouts-sonnet form. We find this form in “At Uncle Norman’s,” its end-words matched to a sonnet by Milton. A pantoum opens the collection. Other poems include epigraphs from renowned writers or borrow opening lines from them. A “Spoon River Poem” also appears.
Especially informative is the poem “Norman Explains Himself after Reading an Encyclopedia Article about the Four Elements.” In “Air” the verse begins, “My life opens and shuts / like wings of a bird.” A line from “Earth” asks, “Why work indoors in fall when earth / is a picnic blanket of bright colors…?” The poem “Water” offers a sad line concerning Norman’s deceased nephew. From “Fire” we read, “I am the fire of sun / and star, lover of daylight and night sky / and the kinetic energy of children.” It’s a marvel how Morris brings Norman’s personality forth into her pronounced and poetic daylight.
At the close of the collection, we feel we’ve lived a portion of a mid-westerner’s life, a very American life of the first half of the 20th century. It’s a special life rooted in the earth and the raising of vegetables and beloved goats, the careful care of children, the respect for elders, a very rural style of country cooking, humor, and more.
We discover strong elements of Norman’s character in “Prehistory of Johnson County”:
The quartzite and granite on the railroad bed
were not part of the land’s story
before white folk settled the prairie, //the stones hauled in from elsewhere
for drainage and ballast
around the ties stitching
the long surgical cut
across Mother Nature’s belly.Uncle Norman taught us not to wound the world,
But to love and study it.
In At Goat Hollow and Other Poems, it’s obvious poet Wilda Morris took Norman’s precious words to heart. The charming volume is a near-cousin, in verse, to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing. Without slipping into sentimentality, Morris honors her relative in a finely shaped and memorable collection.
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Wilda Morris is past president of both the Illinois State Poetry Society and Poets and Patrons of Illinois. She chaired the Stevens Manuscript Competition for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies and has led numerous poetry workshops for children and adults in various states. She is the author of Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies (Rockford Writers Guild Press, 2008) and Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (Kelsay Books, 2019).
Carole Mertz is the author of the collection Color and Line (Kelsay Books, 2021) and the chapbook Toward a Peeping Sunrise (Prolific Press, 2019). Her reviews appear in CutBank, World Literature Today, ARC, MER, and elsewhere. Carole is Poetry Editor of The Ocotillo Review.