Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring

For the retired and/or retiring a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual a poets musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club. Life could become a summer afternoon a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next. The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure--napping complaining gardening volunteering and so on. Observing times curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging and understanding more clearly every day that time doesnt exist anyway the poet relishes moments which are ... liable to be caught like a leaf in the eddy of a brook lodged only long enough to look and which become her subjects. With wry self-deprecating humor Elizabeth Poreba shares a clear-eyed view of the latter part of life. She pursues a quest for understanding as she intertwines urban existence religion and the natural world in unexpected ways for example inserting a dog--a labrador--as the means of preventing the loss of Eden and describing a grandchild as my DNA cunningly packaged his little cap covering potential crackpot notions. --Katrinka Moore Author of Numa and Thief The speaker of these poems may be retired from official service but she is anything but retiring--the liveliness the wry wit the energy of these poems belie any protestations to the contrary. Whether focusing on the natural world family or our shared social environs Poreba brings her crafty skills and sharp eye together with a consciousness of the spiritual element inherent in all experience. A delightful collection that bears re-reading to discover the depths beneath the poems crystal-clear surfaces. --Amy Lemmon Author of Saint Nobody The self who helps us in Elizabeth Porebas new book of poems is a being that like Ariel leads us from form to form from air to earth to water and back again sifting into scenes of the city and elements of nature with elegant and affecting energy. These poems offer us the precarious power of the liminal spirit in action questioning and probing giving us what is left/after the eye parses while weaving/from water/my kind of coherence/gliding like/a key in the right lock. The most sustaining sort of self-help guide Elizabeth Porebas poems open us to our vital hearts. --David Groff Author of Clay Elizabeth Poreba taught English in New York City high schools for thirty-five years and now volunteers as a docent at the Old Merchants House in Manhattan a tutor of conversational English at New York University and a writer of letters to the editor for a couple of environmental organizations. She has published a chapbook The Family Calling (2011) and a collection of poetry Vexed (Wipf and Stock 2015) Her poems have appeared in Ducts.org First Literary Review-East and Commonweal among other print and online publications.