In no mother but the sky, a poet talks about how poetry comes to her. The forces of her natural world surround each lyrical moment, encouraging them to invoke inspiration and creativity. By paying special attention to her backyard landscape and listening for the voices of the ordinary creatures of the forest, a poet finds the "snuffles" which produce the magic. Here, one poet asks her fellow writers to join her-to "pick up a quill." She recalls her own journeys, her starts and re-starts, accomplishments and failures, and builds together with her community of fellow writers and readers. This collection is about belonging and continuing and praising what is discovered "among the waking ladybugs."
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"In these marvelous poems of landscape and alchemy, the poet finds mystery within the ordinary and breathes it into language. In
no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert reveals the enchantment one can find within our ordinary, extraordinary everyday world...if only we know how to look."
-Ginny Lowe Connors, author of White Sail at Midnight
"These are poems deeply connected to the earth which Gilbert knows is the source of poetry; the poet here is like a blind mole who cultivates smells into words, then language into poems that come from deep underground to create 'some place new.' And, magically, Gilbert's work helps our senses to grow sharper."
-Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City
"In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert has gifted the world a gem of landscape and recipe, purslane and milkweed, willow bark and ars poetica, feathered by seasons of hard clay and the thrum of things born anew. Her deft rendering of poet as cultivator, as earth-stirrer, evokes Heaney's famed line, squat pen resting between finger and thumb, saying, 'I'll dig with it.'"
-Scott Frey, author of Heavy Metal Nursing, winner of the 2024 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
Walsh Gilbert, D.: - D. Walsh Gilbert is a dual citizen of the United States of America and the Republic of Ireland. Her poetry collections include Ransom, imagine the small bones, Finches in Kilmainham, Misneach: A Story of Kidnap, Enslavement, and Colonialism, and From the Altar of the Land (all, Grayson Books), Once the Earth had Two Moons (Cerasus Poetry), [M]AR[Y] (Kelsay Books), Deirdre (Impspired) and Bleat & Prattle (Clare Songbirds Publishing House). Her poems appear widely in poetry journals online and in print. She serves on the board of the Riverwood Poetry Series and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review published by the Connecticut Poetry Society.Gilbert lives in Farmington, Connecticut on a former sheep farm at the foot of Talcott Mountain near the watershed of the Farmington River, previously the homelands of the Tunxis and Sukiaugk peoples and near the oldest site of human occupation in Connecticut, dating back 12,500 years. She welcomes turkey, bear, and bobcat as daily visitors from the forest behind her home, writes every day, and visits her family in County Monaghan, Ireland as often as possible.
