To Embroider the Ground with Prayer

Teresa J. Scollon

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780814336205
• eBook ISBN: 9780814336212
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A beautiful meditation on grief, memory, and the seasons of life.

To Embroider the Ground with Prayer is a portrait of poet Teresa J. Scollon's several worlds, as she accompanies her father through his illness and death and records the richness of family and community life in her Michigan town. These poems enjoy reverence and irreverence in equal measure as grief appears side by side with playfulness and humor. Scollon employs a wide range of poetic styles and voices: elegies, narratives, and persona poems are organized in recursive circles that evoke family, village, local characters, and the author's adult life beyond her hometown.

The collection begins with personal history and is rooted in a regional voice and focus, but Scollon skillfully transforms her experiences into larger concerns that resonate deeply and universally. Readers will get to know Scollon's father, in fragile health but still so vital to those around him; trace Scollon's many paths into and out of grief; and follow her travels as she confronts the pull of memory and once again forges her way in the external world. Throughout, Scollon records her understanding with fidelity, clarity, and reverence for story, and finds beauty in small everyday acts of devotion, patience, and humility. As Scollon writes, "To capture story is one way of giving thanks, of paying attention, to know where we are."

Although this is her first full-length collection, Scollon's stirring work is situated in the tradition of American poetry that includes the likes of Ruth Stone, Wendell Berry, Ted Kooser, James Wright, Carl Sandberg, and Edgar Lee Masters. Readers interested in contemporary poetry will be grateful for this profound collection.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Invitation
• Drought Year
• Mid-Life, I’m Lost
• Reciprocity
• Autobiography: Falling
• Family Music
• The Yoga Master at the Party
• Catechism
• July Fourth
• Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game
• John’s a Teacher
• Doc Tells a Story on Horse Piss Wilson
• Goodbye to Dwight Lipke
• Death and the Photocopier
• Exile
• Grief in the Morning
• Conference Room in Bloomington, Minnesota
• The Old Horse
• Pigeon Lady
• New Year’s Day, Winslow Beach, Maine
• A Meeting with the Game Wardens
• Summer Solstice in Black River Falls
• Little Boat
• How My Mother Loves Flowers
• Three A.M.: Prelude
• What Opens
• Untitled
• Poem to My Brothers and Sisters
• The View from Flight 616
• The Moon
• While I Stood in Obedient Line According to the Dictates of Another Round-Trip Ticket
• Commerce
• The-First-Bob-Ever Handles a Middle East Situation
• Halloween at Gross’s Meat Market
• A Visit
• The Last Cat
• At the Crematory
• The Widow Talks about Black Holes
• Everything’s In Motion
• Mitchell’s Story
• Dad Hides His Shakiness by Telling a Story
• Caesura
• Dubrovnik
• Nine
• Words, Poems
• Across the Tracks
• The Garden