A peopled garden

The poetry begins with memories of childhood, of the people and the events which were important to that period of life. The people include the poet's mother and father, grandmothers, aunt, a few friends from adulthood, and her children. The second section within the poetry is organized around the metaphor of life as a garden. The images in these poems are of life--its lushness, its renewing cycles, its sometimes threatening nature, and the human life of exploration and expectation. The poet's primary concerns with form deal with line breaks, the shape of the poem on the page, the sounds of words, and the way in which the words together give rhythm to the lines.

Two adventures of a spunky nine-year-old farm girl are told in the fiction. In TILLY'S NIGHT ADVENTURE, Tilly, late at night, puts some young pigs back in their pen. In TILLY RECKONS WITH A SNAKE, the main character rids the henhouse of a pesky snake which has been eating the eggs. The stories are written for readers in the primary grades. The sentences, though frequently compound, are easy to follow; the images, though of farms, are common to the experiences of many children. The few words which might be beyond a six- to ten-year-old's vocabulary are easily understood from the context of the sentence.