Ms. Rush's poetry both enlightens and sustains as it explores the past and anticipates the future. By taking uncompromising risks, she makes startling connections between love and death, loss and victory, and what she accomplishes with her poetry has been compared to what Eugene O'Neill did in the theatre: an in-depth exploration and re-evaluation of the much loved myths of the American family and American Dream. As a descendent of the original Mormon pioneers and child of the West, she knows her subject matter intimately. She questions what values we should choose to propel us safely into the twenty-first century and by peeling away accepted layers of hypocrisy, she captures intense pain and ecstasy with both clarity and passion. "Her poems are marked by acute observation.... Penetrating insight presented in clear and compelling language."-Senator Eugene McCarthy.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Foreword: Senator Eugene M[sup(c)]Carthy
- Preface: Cheryl Romney-Brown
- I. PIONEERS
- An Heirloom from Utah Pioneer Days
- Photographs
- Inherit the Promise
- For Pioneers
- Mexican Pilgrimage
- A Family Story
- Shadow
- Sundays Below the Rocky Point
- A Woman's Explanation to her Dead Father on Why She Marches Against the Bomb
- In the Crook of His Neck
- For Mother
- Anatomy of an Arranged Marriage
- The Burning Tree
- Pounding Dust
- II. SHATTERED HOUSES
- Rituals
- Brown Wrens
- Gauguin
- Prodigal Fields
- A Peaceable Kingdom
- The Victims
- Mirage
- A Day in Nantucket
- Mother's Gift
- Waiting for the X-Ray
- Searching
- For Les
- The County Fair
- Wings
- Christina's Passion
- Lament
- On the First Day of Spring
- September in Nonquitt
- III. CIRCLING HOME
- To My Eighteen-Year-Old Son
- Taking Leave of the Farm
- One Cold Icy Day
- Across a Roman Piazza
- The Embrace
- Lifelines
- The Arc
- Connections
- Climbing Mount St. Helena in August
- Beauty and Birth
- And then Daybreak
- Through My Secret Garden
- Games
- Smiles
- Orestian Rite
- Circling Home
- Notes
- Biographies