Essential Love: Poems about Mothers and Fathers, Daughters and Sons

Esential Love is an anthology that looks at parents and their children from many angles. The book covers many facets of the parent and child relationship, from parenting a newborn to navigating adolescence to watching a grown child marry. It also features writers looking back at their own childhoods and writing about the evolution of relationships as people relate to their elderly parents. This is a strong collection of poetry by some of our best contemporary poets, as well as by some poets that are relatively unknown. Although only a few of the poems are sentimental in the popular sense of the word, the poems are honest and loving. The book has great depth and staying power; I have turned to it many times and suggested poems from it to others.

Essential Love: Poems About Mothers And Fathers, Daughters And Sons showcases some 150 contemporary American poets as they explore diverse facets of the relationship between parents and children. The poetry reflects joy and grief, milestones and mysteries, the bonds of blood and kinship, and celebrates familial love that endures a lifetime. The reader will readily recognize themselves and their own loved ones in this compendium of memorable poetry. Mothers And Daughters: There is a cord between us/not yet cut/On it we move/like tightrope walkers/novices/uncertain of the net/Take tentative steps/across the gulf/toward one another/Careful/not wishing to turn back/Hopeful/that keeping balance/we can meet/can then embrace/and pass each other/as we must. Maude Meehan.

In ESSENTIAL LOVE, Ginny Lowe Connors has succeeded in organizing an outstanding collection of rich and diverse poems about the relationships between parents and children. The poems are written in accessible language, easily understood, yet rich, bold and poignant. Poems are included by award-winning authors, as well as lesser known poets. The diverse works express the many facets of parenthood and childhood, from joys, mystery and wonder, to hardships, pain and unending worries. The book is a celebration of these relationships in all their complexity. Connors also manages to incorporate a nice balance of poems which preserve the simplicity and awe intrinsic to the parent/child bond. This thoughtfully constructed and creative book would make a great gift for grandparents, parents, children, friends, sisters, teachers.... Curling up with this book is like taking a journey to the soul, a worthy and satisfying excursion.