Peggy Turnbull

The Joy of Their Holiness Peggy Turnbull

Before calling Peggy Turnbull's poems "poignant," I looked the word up to find it might suggest sadness and even some regret. Yet it also connotes a sharpness or pungency. There is some sadness here, yes, yet the poems are also pungent like a sharp Wisconsin cheddar. Turnbull always acknowledges "the goddess / of sweet small things" and celebrates "the blessings in my tiny, mortal life." Hers is "a world suffused with awe." She allows the small things she encounters to speak for themselves and brings us to their greater wonder. This is a remarkable collection.

Tom Montag, Poet, essayist, and blogger. Author of Seventy at Seventy, The Big Book of Ben Zen, In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013; co-editor (with David Graham) of Local News: Poetry About Small Towns.

Peggy Turnbull's poems are "thimbles full of joy." They are rife with deliciousness: briny olives, zingy red sauce, sweet blueberries simmering in batter. They are prickly with brittle grass and wild turkeys, a "pigeon-colored sky" overhead. These are poems of family and tradition; they honor the natural world. Under Turnbull's graceful pen and skillful eye, nothing escapes her, no scent or sound, nor sight. "[Your] body grows beyond its borders into the moment of [her] attention. Yes, I see you. Yes, we are connected." Indeed we are.

Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-18. Author of Grief Bone and The Theory of Lipstick

Poised between eons past and future, "We are here," Peggy Turnbull writes, "to sing our one song." Hers is a symphony, animated by love, wonder, reverence. In these poems, she rejoices in moments of revelation-the voices of children playing quietly, "as beautiful as the Gospel," a Buddha with "tawny dreadlocks" encountered in the AutoZone, the "coyote who leaps into my path." Mother, child, and father come together in one poem as the poet marks how, "The night ratchets up in happiness," and asks, [C]reation, bringer of our abundance-how to bless it in return." These poems may be that blessing.

Erica Strauss, retired English lecturer, University of Wisconsin System; co-founder and President, Lakeshore Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Manitowoc, Wisconsin