Sherry Chandler

Many of us know Elaine Fowler Palencia as the author of two short-story collections, Small Caucasian Woman (1993) and Brier Country (2000), both from University of Missouri Press. Although Elaine lives in Illinois now, she spent a good part of her childhood in Morehead, Kentucky and, like its famous son gone off to Iowa, she writes on the matter of Morehead. The perspective from a woman’s eye, though not softer, is considerably different.

Elaine is an incandescent poet with two chapbook collections available from Grex Press. (Disclosure: Grex Press is an arm of Green River Writers, Inc., of which I am board chair.) Taking the Train (1997) and The Dailiness of It (2002) deal with “the unspoken part of life with a child who has severe mental and physical difficulties.” I am featuring my review of The Dailiness of It on my reviews page. In the introduction, Elaine has a thought-provoking explanation of why she, a fiction writer for 20 years, needed poetry to write about “the regionof unlikeness -where we live with Andrew.” I recommend it to you. And I’ll share with you this snippet of her author’s interview in Spoon River Poetry Review:

Writing fiction…is like building a house with a dinner fork and a plastic spatula. If you just keep at it, you’ll get the structure. But poetry for me is like hearing a train coming and just walking out onto the track and getting hit.

Here is a poem from Taking the Train:

The Starling in the Piano

In grade school we planted beans in paper cups
And set them on window sills
Where the embryos split their jackets
Unfurled   yawned   stretched
Reached tiny hands to the sun
Though some seeds
Stayed curled in the chrysalis of sleep
Until they rotted.

When the brain of our infant boy
Did not fully wake
I thought of those beans
And wondered why some sprout and others don’t
My thoughts tempting me over the edge of nothing
But my mother recalled the grand piano
We once bought from a woman who hadn’t
Played a song or opened a window in thirty years.
Inside that tuned mahogany tomb
A dry starling lay like a jet-beaded bag.

There are some things in life we can’t understand
Said my mother:
A starling in a piano must mean
That it got there somehow.
She knows that if you’re careful to think in circles
You won’t end up in a place you’ve never been.