Too Bright to See & Alma

Linda Gregg's Too Bright To See & Alma is a lyrical, emotional volume of free-verse poetry ranging across the depths of human experience. The stanzas comprising the poems all tie into the common theme/protagonism of Alma, her husband, her relationship to nature, and the world around her. A moving, illuminating saga filled with thought and love for life. Saying Good-Bye To The Dead: I walk on the dirt roads being my father./Between tobacco fields empty in February/except for the wooden stakes and the wires./The earth is spongy after the rains/which washed the snow away. Dogs bark/near the houses around the fields./Mountains beyond that. I clap my hands/in the air over my head, four times./Turn on one foot around with my arms lifted./Stop and look at the sky fast and hard./Then walk to the bakery and buy day-old/sweet rolls to eat in my room at the hotel.

The poetry of Linda Gregg has received numerous awards for excellence, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and A Whiting Award. To Bright To See & Alma combines Linda's first two books under one cover and will admirably serve to both showcase and introduce her literary talent to a new generation of readers. No More Marriages: Well, there ain't going to be no more marriages./And no goddam honeymoons. Not if I can help it./Not that I don't like men,/being in bed with them and all. It's the rest./And that's what happens, isn't it? All those people/that get littler together. I want things/to happen to me the proper size./The moon and the salmon and me and the fir trees,/they're all the same size and they live together./I'm the worse part, but mean no harm./I might scare a deer, but I can walk and breathe/as quiet as a person can learn./If I'm not like my grandmother's garden/that smelled sweet all over and was warm/as a river, I do go up the mountain/to see the birds close and look/at the moon just come visible, and lie down/to look at it with my face open./Guilty or not, through, there won't be no post-/cards made up of my life with Delphi on them./No even if I have to eat along all these years./They're never going to do that to me.'