no mother but the sky

In no mother but the sky, a poet talks about how poetry comes to her. The forces of her natural world surround each lyrical moment, encouraging them to invoke inspiration and creativity. By paying special attention to her backyard landscape and listening for the voices of the ordinary creatures of the forest, a poet finds the "snuffles" which produce the magic. Here, one poet asks her fellow writers to join her-to "pick up a quill." She recalls her own journeys, her starts and re-starts, accomplishments and failures, and builds together with her community of fellow writers and readers. This collection is about belonging and continuing and praising what is discovered "among the waking ladybugs."

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"In these marvelous poems of landscape and alchemy, the poet finds mystery within the ordinary and breathes it into language. In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert reveals the enchantment one can find within our ordinary, extraordinary everyday world...if only we know how to look."

-Ginny Lowe Connors, author of White Sail at Midnight

"These are poems deeply connected to the earth which Gilbert knows is the source of poetry; the poet here is like a blind mole who cultivates smells into words, then language into poems that come from deep underground to create 'some place new.' And, magically, Gilbert's work helps our senses to grow sharper."

-Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City

"In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert has gifted the world a gem of landscape and recipe, purslane and milkweed, willow bark and ars poetica, feathered by seasons of hard clay and the thrum of things born anew. Her deft rendering of poet as cultivator, as earth-stirrer, evokes Heaney's famed line, squat pen resting between finger and thumb, saying, 'I'll dig with it.'"

-Scott Frey, author of Heavy Metal Nursing, winner of the 2024 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry