Source: Poet
Paperback, 150 pgs.
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the moon won’t be dared by Anne Leigh Parrish opens “among the trees” where the forest is populated by trees in competition with one another, yet united in their need of rooting. Lydia Selk’s collage imposes a woman on the forest of birches in the dense foliage, lying with arched back and eyes closed. Here she seems at peace, but as onlookers (like the statue in the foreground), she’s aware of witnesses who may judge her for her sheer presence. This unique collection is not how art informs poetry like in ekphrastic poems, but how the art of Lydia Selk accompanying these poems is informed by Parrish’s words. But that is not all that’s going on in this collection.
Parrish is a great observer of nature and the world around her, and she invokes the power of that world to demonstrate just how insignificant we can be and how natural power continues regardless of what we think or feel. Like in “storm,” the clouds are gathering and rearranging, while the narrator is talking, but her conversation does nothing but bring noise to a building storm that breaks and drifts on a rush of wind.
Some of my favorite poems in the collection are in the mid- to latter-half. From “the plains, as seen from above” where a river’s curves are compared to a woman’s hips and the changes the world and the woman have endured over time to “tutelage” where a woman looks back on all that she’s learned from her mother and other peers in her life, only to find the teachings less than adequate and that she may have more to teach them.
the moon won’t be dared by Anne Leigh Parrish, which toured with Poetic Book Tours, is a journey into womanhood and nature that leaves you naked in the forest, but unafraid. Readers will see how the artist Lydia Selk was inspired by Parrish’s imaginative poems that reflect on what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated society and what it means to break free and to own who you are.
***Check out my interview with Anne Leigh Parrish***
RATING: Quatrain
About the Poet:
Anne Leigh Parrish is the author of nine previously published books: A Winter Night (Unsolicited Press 2021); What Nell Dreams, a novella & stories (Unsolicited Press, 2020); Maggie’s Ruse, a novel, (Unsolicited Press, 2017); The Amendment, a novel (Unsolicited Press, 2017); Women Within, a novel (Black Rose Writing, 2017); By the Wayside, stories (Unsolicited Press, 2017); What Is Found, What Is Lost, a novel (She Writes Press, 2014); Our Love Could Light The World, stories (She Writes Press, 2013); and All The Roads That Lead From Home, stories (Press 53, 2011). Visit her website.