Publisher's Synopsis
Linda Caldwell's poems skillfully uncover the treasures of place and the people
who tend it. The poems in Home Place reveal a speaker in tune with the land,
and the reader is transported to this place "where gone things whisper." Linda
Caldwell is a poet truly at home with the music of the poetic line and the art of
storytelling. Her collection connects us to generations of wisdom and poignantly
reminds us that ghosts are always with us as we "live on resurrected ground."
Tina Parker, author of Mother May I and Another Offering
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In "Flagwoman on a Dangerous Curve," Linda Caldwell creates an apt metaphor
for the poet of this collection, "caught /between the world of cars and animals
/and the world where / gone things whisper." Caldwell is a keen observer
and unsentimental describer of her rural world, who also senses the presence
of "ghosts" through objects they touched and remembered scenes overlaid on
present experiences. Her farm has both "sunlight balancing / on spiny cedar
needles" and a dead calf's bloody skin hung over an orphan's back in hopes of
persuading a cow to nurse it. Several poems are tender and powerful elegies for
the beloved father whose "desertion" assaults her as she opens a gate, placing
fingers "where yours marked/the cold dew on steel." Honoring her ancestry
and the old people, the first people, she understands that both figuratively and
literally, "from springs and wells / we drink their bones." Caldwell's imagery
is sharp and often surprising, from the "skimmed milk blue" of kitchen walls to
desires that "trundle, one after the other / like steers lured by the scent of salt."
With beautiful language, she draws readers into a world where "Blue light pastes
thin limbs / against the sky" and "the past swallows tomorrow."
Barbara Wade, author of Inside Passage
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Linda Caldwell is a poet and playwright living on a farm near Paint Lick, Kentucky. She has received two grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has published in many journals and anthologies including Coe Review, Pearl, Prairie Schooner, Tears in the Fence (UK), Motif: Writing by Ear, Newgrowth, and Writing Who We Are. She is also a volunteer at Friends of Paint Lick, an award winning, grassroots community service organization.
