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In Gloucester, Massachusetts, Lila Swift Monell is well known as "The Bird Lady", a sanctuary of last resort for injured birds and other wild woods and shore creatures. Her beautiful photography has graced newspaper articles and now her exquisite poetry is available in Parlez-Moi Press's first hard-copy publication. This beautifully designed book contains a hundred of Lila's poems as well as her own photographs of Martha Graham and Auntie Also, two of her beloved pet guinea fowl (that's four faces of Martha Graham on the cover.) Several of the pages are also decorated with Lila's line drawings. Copies are available
at The Bookstore on Main Street in Gloucester, Massachusetts and at Toad
Hall Books on Main Street in Rockport, Massachusetts or by contacting
Parlez-Moi Press. |
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Praise for the poetry of Lila Swift Monell: Like Lila herself, her poetry has a quiet elegance.
Her wisdom and acuteness of perception come through. Her poetry is good
reading. In her poetry Lila leads us quietly into familiar
worlds made new by her penetrating vision. Each line is carefully chiseled
in deceptively simple language that captures the incongruous and unexpected,
and leaves the reader with enduring images, the toad on a December night,
old photographs of a once vibrant world, a snake requiring a new skin.
Read them again and again and feel your own self grow. Thirty-three years ago I wrote a rumination in the
newspaper on the ins and outs of a Cape Ann thick o’ fog, as the
old timers say. It was illustrated with a single, wondrous photograph
by Lila of a trembling cobweb succinctly beaded with the predawn drift
of the sea dampness of the night, the symmetrically receding droplets
carrying one’s gaze ever deeper into the dewy, infinite, gossamer
center for which patient spider seemed to spin and search for without
cease. That haunting image, it strikes me, remains an earlier, more tactile
metaphor for Lila’s later inspiration, so vulnerable, so resilient,
so touched with the passage of the fog as the poet gazes ever deeper into
the retreating center so common to us all. Monell’s
poems have a tidal rhythm that pulls the reader deeper into her world,
which entwines the joy and necessary cruelties of Nature with the pains
and ecstasies of being human. Here is a poet who has communed deeply with
plants and animals -- wild and not so wild -- not as escape, but in search
of a greater understanding of herself, and by extension, of those around
her. This would be no strange land to Emily Dickinson, and if we look
closely enough, it will be no strange land to us. |
 At the request of the author, the profits from this book will be donated to the Massachusetts Audubon Society |
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2004 Parlez-Moi Press • All rights reserved. |
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