This Going, This Grace
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ENDORSEMENTS
"As Maureen Ackerman writes in a characteristically tough and tender poem, 'Everything sings for love.' Her poems arise like a soloist in a choir, whose individual beauty and brilliance occur within and depend on her awareness of the group. She is of and for this world, yet perched above it, too, involved in what she calls 'the trick of stars.' Here is a dazzling poet. Here is a lyrical, generous heart."
—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Making Toast and Kayak Morning
“Maureen Ackerman’s poems are fresh and ardent and ravishing. Her images—a bird poised on the lip of a pool; a deer captured in the chapel of dusk—come from a simple world, the natural world, yet she transforms them into symbols of radiance, of transcendence. Ackerman writes from a place of true understanding: of the knotty complexity of love, the inexorability of time, the enduring consolations of nature. Her poems have depth and reach but also an unmistakable lightness. They are infused by something she writes about often: grace.”
—Jessica Teich, author of the memoir The Future Tense of Joy
“Maureen Ackerman writes from the deepest part of her heart about her experiences witnessing the miracles of nature. There is a spiritual quality of a higher power that flows from her writing. I recommend this book as a must read for people who love nature but may have trouble finding the words to share their feelings with others.”
— Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., author of Love is Letting Go of Fear
“The thing I love the most about Maureen Ackerman’s poems is how they’re never in a hurry. They move carefully, intellectually, and emotionally to their conclusion, and in doing so we are witnesses to the complications of the mind and how it addresses topics like love and loss, and so much more. The poems beautifully contain these movements within the stuff of the world—leaves, crows, blood, the brain, the sky. Her images are often haunting. Yet her choice of musical phrases is both deft and comforting. Her poetry is just plain lovely.”
— Michael Henry, author of No Stranger Than My Own and Active Gods
“Maureen Ackerman’s poems are filled with deep love and wisdom. They take you on wild journeys of reflection and immersion into sublime beauty, lift you up in ecstatic surrender, and then hold you very close to the warm light of the soul of this world, with so much tenderness that you will, indeed, find light streaming everywhere, from you. What a gift she embodies, and what a gift for the reader to be invited into her world!”
— Sergio Baroni, LCSW, Psychotherapist, contributing author in Ready, Set, Live!
“In lyrical language, Maureen Ackerman’s poems express the beauty and transcendence of life and love. They are infused with both the hard grace of loving what is difficult and the tenderness of living through the light. I feel blessed and inspired by reading This Going, This Grace.”
— Marci Shimoff, #1 NY Times bestselling author, Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul
"There are lines here that carry me beyond my guarded everyday self, uncovering perceptions that are painfully wonderful—what happens when we touch truth. One favorite line: But I believe / there has to be a symmetry of grace / in such a gift as late December swans / in easy glide… Carefully crafted imagery like that summons the voices of Mary Oliver and even Yeats, reminding me why I read poetry."
— Hal Zina Bennett, author of Write From the Heart: Unleashing the Power of Your Creativity
Read in the Author's words how this book of poetry came to be:
An image: My father, head bent to a book, at home among page people in a world made up out of words. An idea: That I could enter that world, that I could count on its constancy, imagine its truth. Little wonder, then, that I’d make a life out of what I loved: Words, and their power to make things—to make us—known and knowable.
And why not? Growing up in a place called Poet’s Corner, in the shadow of a church and school and convent named for St. Brigid, patron saint of poets and sweet saint of compassion, what was an Irish girl to do with all that stained glass suffering and someday-salvation and insistence on what couldn’t be seen? Gather it, of course; translate it; practice forever how to keep a quiet eye, how to hear the seed becoming, how to be the child bent sideways to the light. On the north shore of Long Island, where I later lived on Convent Drive and watched the sea and sky stretch in impossible light, the girl grew old, but the eye still looked toward what the heart might hear, and the pen skipped faithfully across the page.
Now that I’ve gathered up the simple stems and petals that the years have rearranged, I realize more clearly than ever the connection between our sense of place and our sense of self. My mother was right: Everything (and every place) has something it can tell.
Maureen Sweeney Ackerman
April 2019
Denver, Colorado
