She Wore Emerald Then

Reflections on Motherhood

By Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson

with photography by May Lattanzio

Moods of Motherhood: thirty poems by award-winning poets Magdalena Ball

and Carolyn Howard-Johnson, with original photography by May Lattanzio.

A beautifully presented, tender and strikingly original gift book, ideal for

Mother's Day or any day when you want to celebrate the notion of

motherhood in its broadest sense.  Share this collection with someone you love.

 

Purchase an electronic copy of She Wore Emerald Then for only $2 (less than the cost of a card)


 

Or a beautiful hardcopy with full color interior

 

For media enquiries or review copies, please contact Carolyn Howard Johnson at HOJONEWS@aol.com, or Magdalena Ball at maggieball@compulsivereader.com

 

She Wore Emerald Than has been named a finalist in the USA Book News 2009 NBBA Best Book Awards! 

She Wore Emerald Then named as 2009 top ten read at MyShelf.com by Jennifer Akers.

 

 

Sample Poems

Mother’s Bed

Listen to the author: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/Mother's Bed.mp3

by Magdalena Ball

In the restless night

when mortality lurks in every shadow

the blanket won’t cover your fear

and morning is a half-forgotten dream

vague and uncertain,

slink into my bed

the pillow holds a mother’s secret

whispered charm

you can sink your head into.

 

There are no demons here;

no whirlwind of memory and anticipation clouding

sleep

only eternal warmth

a shared space

free from the ticking illusion

of time, motion, and change.

 

Here, where you are always welcome

nothing matters

except this peace

this place

containing every possible now.

 

 

Could It Have Been Otherwise?

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson 

At eighty-eight, she (tired

of the twenty first century

 

before it has become school

age) pleads, weary

 

before dinner, eyes

too weak to read.

 

I turn on the TV,

grab a VCR to cheer

 

her. I'm too slow, way

too slow. Instead of You're lookin’

 

swell, Dolly, she is treated

to Aulnay-sous-Bois'

 

streets aflame, backlash,

ghetto or banlieues

 

nothing new

in new millennium.

 

REVIEWS

"She Wore Emerald Then is more than a collection of poems; it is a collection of life. Each is poignantly written, taking the reader to the brink of emotion as a memory long forgotten is evoked, only to resurrect another time and place as the page is turned. Not only filled with beauty in its words, She Wore Emerald Then is filled with the complexities and challenges life visits upon us from conception to a last breath; a verbal and visual experience from start to finish." --Jozette Aaron, editor of DeSilva's News

***

A book of finely cut gems to hold, admire, let their multi-facets flash their messages to mind, and the fine sharp edges of each plane hold the image indelibly. The poets take us either side of motherhood and all the pain and joy held in between.  We visit, through Magdalena’s eyes,  the arrival that makes a mother – the amazement, the awe, the juxtaposing of  life’s simple statement ‘I am’ against the complexities of “The Genetic Code” that made the babe –  

the organised complexity

of your extraordinary

beauty

couldn’t be simpler

as you reach a tentative

hand

towards the future

 Then we are led by Carolyn, down the narrowing path to the final drawn out exit. The circle of life completes, the child is yet to know the mother, the mother has forgotten the child…

We all forget names, I say as numb

moves from hand to heart

because it is my name she has forgotten.

Gems sparkling here remind us of those seminal joys – the babe, the birth; other gems flash from the page and we recognise, whether we want to or no – the final pages turning to the close of one life’s book. -- J.R.McRae

***

"What relationship is more complex or more elemental than the mother-child bond? Abraham Lincoln said, 'All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.' Toni Morrison wrote, 'Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What's that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don't mean a thing.'

 
Both of those quotes, as well as one by Honore de Balzac at the beginning of SHE WORE EMERALD THEN, perfectly describe this collection of poems by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball---poetry that catches at your soul. Both of them reprise their poems from Ball's QUARK SOUP, Howard-Johnson's TRACINGS, and their joint collection, CHERISHED PULSE. Fans of CHERISHED PULSE will be pleased to learn that the poets continue to write poems that don't sound either like banal Hallmark cards or the bitter-at-dysfunctional-family jeremiads that habitually torture MFA writing workshop participants.
 
The two poets complement each other (with words accompanied by stunning photography by May Lattanzio). The opus covers both the grand sweep of the birth of all universal life and the private universe populated by only an adult daughter watching her mother struggle to eat dinner and remembering how her mother washed her one slip. While Ball explores the cosmic continuum and traces us all back to the mother spark that set the stars burning, Howard-Johnson concentrates her portraiture on the deeply personal. But Ball also talks about the oxytocin haze of giving birth and her mother vomiting from cancer drugs. To quote the last poem in the collection, 'Hallmark Couldn't Possibly Get This Right.' When you read about the tough love of the universe or Ball's sienna childhood photograph or Howard-Johnson's mother forgetting her name, you want to cry and hug your mother (and your children, if you have them), because they capture the eternal tug of war between joy and sorrow in the mother-child bond."--Kristin Johnson, poet, author, screenwriter and founder of the Poet Warrior Project, http://poetwarriorproject.blogspot.com

***

Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson (with photos by May Lattanzio) have joined forces to produce an intriguing look at mothers and motherhood in She Wore Emerald Then...This collection of poems offers some traditional scenes of mother / daughter relationships and others that are different and intriguing. --Willie Elliot, www.myshelf.com

***

"This is a collection of poetry that movingly illustrates many aspects of motherhood and, if you are a poetry lover, there is much that you will find appealing and thought-provoking. In the first half of the book, the poems by Magdalena Ball have a cosmic quality to them and some wonderful imagery. In the poem 'Coil of Life', for example, giving birth is described as the 'Big Bang' and in 'Assault by a Black Hole', the reader is taken on a journey from the sublime to the commonplace and you can't help but smile..."  Helena Harper, Author, It's a Teacher's Life

 

About the authors and photographer
 

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry (including this year's Roland Robinson literary award), and fiction. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything and two other poetry chapbooks Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse.  She runs a monthly radio program podcast  www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's first novel, This is the Place, and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered are both award-winners. Her fiction, nonfiction and poems appear in national magazines, anthologies and review journals. She speaks on culture, tolerance, writing and promotion and has appeared on TV and hundreds of radio stations nationwide. She is an instructor for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and has shared her expertise at venues like San Diego State's world renowned Writers' Conference, Dayton University's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop and SPAN's (Small Publishers Association of North America) annual conference. Carolyn  was recently awarded Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment by the California Legislature; her home town's Character and Ethics Commission honored her for her work on promoting tolerance and the Pasadena Weekly named her to their list of "San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen" for literary activism. Her nitty-gritty how-to book, The Frugal Book Promoter won USA Book News' Best Professional Book 2004 and her chapbook of poetry, Tracings, was honored by the Military Writers' Society of America for excellence. It is now available from Finishing Line Press and Amazon.  Her literary website is on part of this site on this page: http://carolynhoward-johnson.com.

May Lattanzio is not a stereotypical grandmother. She is a freelance writer, a poet, author, an animal and nature lover. When she first went digital ('cause she couldn't use a viewfinder anymore), she took her camera out onto her acres in NW Florida, concentrating on the many insects.
Her websites are: http://inkedin.ning.com/profile/Maziel
www.thelensflare.com/u_may.php, www.jpgmag.com/people/maziel.
http://maylattanzio.blogspot.com/