Telling Tales of Dusk

Some people are born to write from their heart and their soul. Terri Erickson is one of those. Her ability to take the daily experiences of life, the simple, commonplace events that all humans have and deliver them from her heart and soul directly to ours is a rare gift. She has always been a poet and now we get to share all of those wonderful thoughts and stories that she had in her head for so many years. We will be blessed and better people by reading this poetry. Expressions of love, redemption and healing will be evident and you will feel warm all over. Mark Houston MD, MS Nashville, Tennessee

Terri Kirby Erickson's most recent book of poetry "Telling Tales of Dusk" is a true masterpiece! This collection is a warm delight for all your senses. From the moment you open the book it envelopes you and helps you recapture those ethereal morsels of the southern experience that indulge both your memory and your heart. She presents the smallest slivers of the fragile beauty of "Southern-ness" that remain in your remembrances but performs this magic with such grace and elegance as to have broad based appeal. This artist masterfully stirs your senses and soul together. You actually taste the hot biscuits, coffee and butter melting in your mouth in her poem "Cathead Biscuits" while you stop and inhale the summer flowers in "Ila's Garden". Her imagery is honest and frail and the author offers to peel back the hidden label of reality with poems like "Starlight Motel" and "When the Sky Makes Love to You" which beckon with such promise. This collection is a fabulous smattering of life, love, longing with a pinch of wistfullness added for good measure. Refreshingly, it is totally devoid of the faux existential sludge and heavy self-indulgent angst and ego of much of modern poetry. The author grabs your hand with her words and visits with you on the front porch like an old dear friend sipping sweet iced tea and revealing her charms. Terri Kirby Erickson's poetic prowess and sheer talent pours through and she delivers a book of beauty, reflection and accessibility. No collection would be complete without a copy of this true and timeless masterpiece.

What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In Telling Tales of Dusk by Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems "County Fair," "Star Lite Motel," "Betty's Roadside Diner," and "Saving Grace," respectively. And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how "Queen Anne's lace dandies up a ditch" ("Queen Anne's Lace"), in how an old woman's moaning is like the wind "when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks," ("Assisted Living") searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity. The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in "The Speckled Trout Café," the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife "the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds" in "Papa Never Learned to Read," and the blues guitarist in "Delta Blues" who, the speaker comments, "should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but" instead lifts "it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen." These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, "tell all the truth but tell it slant." In "Smoke and Mirrors," for example, Erickson doesn't spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: "The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you." Similarly, in "Daisy Chain," she presents the image of four little girls "daisy chained" to their mother to illustrate "belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement." Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken togethe

I'd suppose it was about 35 years ago on a Christmas Eve when I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette during a snowfall. In wonder, there was silent lightning above the clouds. I think the unsmoked butt burned my knuckles. Long since thought forgotten, the uncanny beauty of that night returned when I read Terri Kirby Erickson's remarkable book of poems, "Telling Tales of Dusk." These verses are alternately earthy and ethereal, carefully wrought with a delicate hand and fingers that appear to know how to make fists. A lone tree-rat becomes as slender and precious as a Ming vase in 'Squirrel'. A cat-head biscuit - sharecropper's grub - and three eggs in a country café becomes the history of the world in fast-forward. Many of Ms. Erickson's wonderful poems revolve around such seemingly off-handed details, but her voice is always elegant and carefully distilled. And I think: this is the trick that Yeats pulled, isn't it? In 'Granddaddy's Ghost' the poet remembers her mother, a girl herself then, in the kitchen as the poet's grandfather is stricken and dies. His ghost, his soul, becomes the wispy smoke from a pot of beans scorching on the stove while the living tend to the dead "as if he heard his little girl cry and came running". Such calm and cautiously chosen words suggest years of thought and discernment. With 'Lilacs' she describes her husband being asked by the undertaker's removal men in suits to hold his father's head, and guesses how very heavy it must have been, but concludes you made him seem light as flowers/ as if you were a small boy holding/lilacs, careful not to crush them in your hands. This is the voice of a witness, and one humble enough to envy the strut of crows. This is the sight of lightning in a snowstorm. I could recommend no current book of poems more urgently. These poems are gifts to the world.

I can't wait to read this book! Terri Kirby Erickson has a way of bringing a soul home to roost. Her poetry, is indeed her own song and she creates images that catch you on your way through life and make you settle in, be still, and listen to her melodies. In doing so, you can find your own voice again. That is the true gift of a poet. Her inspiration, from her first book "Thread Count", spread to my own life and I am a poet now. Humble to be sure, I write poetry about Donkeys through The Donkey Sanctuary in the UK. Terri's poetry brings a sudden quietness and modesty to the world. I found myself re-enchanted with my memories. Memories that I may not have willingly gotten too close to. I liken Terri's poetry to the loveliness of the writings of Mary Oliver. True poets that create miracles, make you smile at your fears, because you fear nothing.