Home Place

<p>Linda Caldwell’s poems skillfully uncover the treasures of place and the people<br />who tend it. The poems in <em>Home Place </em>reveal a speaker in tune with the land<br />and the reader is transported to this place “where gone things whisper.” Linda<br />Caldwell is a poet truly at home with the music of the poetic line and the art of<br />storytelling. Her collection connects us to generations of wisdom and poignantly<br />reminds us that ghosts are always with us as we “live on resurrected ground.”<br />~Tina Parker author of <em>Mother May I </em>and <em>Another Offering</em></p><p>***<br />In “Flagwoman on a Dangerous Curve” Linda Caldwell creates an apt metaphor<br />for the poet of this collection “caught /between the world of cars and animals<br />/and the world where / gone things whisper.” Caldwell is a keen observer<br />and unsentimental describer of her rural world who also senses the presence<br />of “ghosts” through objects they touched and remembered scenes overlaid on<br />present experiences. Her farm has both “sunlight balancing / on spiny cedar<br />needles” and a dead calf’s bloody skin hung over an orphan’s back in hopes of<br />persuading a cow to nurse it. Several poems are tender and powerful elegies for<br />the beloved father whose “desertion” assaults her as she opens a gate placing<br />fingers “where yours marked/the cold dew on steel.” Honoring her ancestry<br />and the old people the first people she understands that both figuratively and<br />literally “from springs and wells / we drink their bones.” Caldwell’s imagery<br />is sharp and often surprising from the “skimmed milk blue” of kitchen walls to<br />desires that “trundle one after the other / like steers lured by the scent of salt.”<br />With beautiful language she draws readers into a world where “Blue light pastes<br />thin limbs / against the sky” and “the past swallows tomorrow.”<br />~Barbara Wade author of <em>Inside Passage</em></p><p>***</p><p>Linda Caldwell is a poet and playwright living on a farm near Paint Lick Kentucky. She has received two grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has published in many journals and anthologies including <em>Coe Review Pearl Prairie Schooner Tears in the Fence</em> (UK) <em>Motif: Writing by Ear Newgrowth </em>and <em>Writing Who We Are</em>. She is also a volunteer at Friends of Paint Lick an award winning grassroots community service organization.</p>