Passionate about poetry and seeking guidance to write her own, Melissa Green embarked on a Masters program at Boston University in 1981 and immediately caught the attention of her teacher, Derek Walcott, and his friend the Russian Joseph Brodsky. Giants of American poetry and Nobel prize winners, they recognized in her a literary peer with an innate and dazzling talent.
In a parallel reality, Melissa was living a knife-edge
existence, her life an unpredictable and embattled odyssey between poetry and
despair, a pendulum-swing between fervent, luminous writing and sudden,
ferocious bouts of suicidal illness. In a black shipwreck of a house, she hid
away for years, caring for her demanding and difficult grandmother.
That she survives is our blessing; that she has retrieved poetry
from the abyss is a timeless boon. As poet Zireaux writes: …
having travelled to the outer reaches of human experience … with a fine-tuned
lyre and Odyssean strength of purpose, Melissa Green reports her discoveries
back home, in the language they demand.
In The Linen Way, Melissa walks the reader along the
thin, perilous path between poetry’s affirmation of life and the unwelcome
ghosts of hope apparently lost; a linen way, perhaps, but wrought also of fire
and sulfur and the ironmonger’s hammer.
Melissa discusses her work with
Rosa Mira Books.An excerpt from the ebook can be read here at Parnassus Review.
The Linen Way is available for US11 dollars here.
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