Home Place

Linda Caldwell’s poems skillfully uncover the treasures of place and the peoplewho 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.” LindaCaldwell is a poet truly at home with the music of the poetic line and the art ofstorytelling. Her collection connects us to generations of wisdom and poignantlyreminds us that ghosts are always with us as we “live on resurrected ground.”~Tina Parker, author of Mother May I and Another Offering***In “Flagwoman on a Dangerous Curve,” Linda Caldwell creates an apt metaphorfor the poet of this collection, “caught /between the world of cars and animals/and the world where / gone things whisper.” Caldwell is a keen observerand unsentimental describer of her rural world, who also senses the presenceof “ghosts” through objects they touched and remembered scenes overlaid onpresent experiences. Her farm has both “sunlight balancing / on spiny cedarneedles” and a dead calf’s bloody skin hung over an orphan’s back in hopes ofpersuading a cow to nurse it. Several poems are tender and powerful elegies forthe beloved father whose “desertion” assaults her as she opens a gate, placingfingers “where yours marked/the cold dew on steel.” Honoring her ancestryand the old people, the first people, she understands that both figuratively andliterally, “from springs and wells / we drink their bones.” Caldwell’s imageryis sharp and often surprising, from the “skimmed milk blue” of kitchen walls todesires 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 pastesthin limbs / against the sky” and “the past swallows tomorrow.”~Barbara Wade, author of Inside Passage***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.