Shirley Love

Far Side of the Room Shirley Love

From the Kansas dust bowl to present day Los Angeles, Shirley Love's poetry is engaged with the question of what is essential, searching for "safe passages through night kitchens and broken weather." But "answers to riddles are not sung in a dominant chord." So it's not only in stories passed down from one generation to another, or in a personal mythology holding family history together, that a daughter begins to understand her mother, or a boy his father. It's more like an act of faith when "what opens in one mind is received by another." In these moments, a daughter just opens her mouth and sings and a husband is seen, as for the first time, kneeling in the garden planting a white azalea.