Poetry

An Opera of Hankering

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Poems

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Excerpts

To Long Again

Fifty crows scream in the black-
branched first light; me out here
scraping my car windows when what I want is to
be
sitting up in my warm bed, reading something delicious like
Middlemarch for the first time and sipping vanilla bean coffee, just
brewed, ruminating a real bagel, heaped with strawberry jam I made
if
I had picked them last June, wearing a white d’Urberville
gown, riding out to the field on a wagon with
the rest of the ruddy-souled.
O
to be isolato as many minutes, days as necessary to feel
sated.  To long again for
you
and the company of others.  Not
brushing half a foot of snow off the roof of my car so an avalanche doesn’t blind me at the STOP.

First Man—1947

By my gramma’s washtubs,
I watched him skin a squirrel:
slit the fur around the legs,
up its belly;
peel the skin perfectly back
from the naked pink body,
glistening wet and veined.

On Christmas, all of us in the living
room after the big dinner off
my gramma’s Fostoria, he
told stories of tanks and wine
cellars, with one foot up
on a straight-back chair.

I thought him very handsome.

We laughed. Everybody. Except
sometimes my grandmother was thin-
lipped, suspecting him of “drinking.”

He teased─teased us all.

I liked that in this house of women
who never did.

He was “Uncle Chuckie”
’til he came back from the war.
The Black Sheep. Everybody said,
Oh, smart─no question ’bout that.
They left unsaid the other half
as families do.
My mother told me stories:
When Charles was young, he wrote
bad checks to pay his paper bill.
His brother’s route was perfect,
with money in savings where their dad
was chief cashier. His father said,
Why can’t you be like Jim?

That part made me mad.

The woman he married, said,
“Don’t pick me up after work
in your stained work-clothes.”

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Reviews

“There are times when a collection of poems strikes an especially congenial chord for me. The poems in Ginnah Howard’s An Opera of Hankering do that with their clarity, energy, and immediacy. “Immediacy”—that’s the right word. Descriptive, detailed, beautifully written and formed, taken one at a time and all together Howard’s poems have me right there with her despite our very different life experiences and trajectories.

Covering the gamut of her long, full life, these seventy poems are boundlessly honest and revealing. Across the volume’s sections, I am astounded most by the contrasts in mood and diction. From meditative to rebellious, from deeply serious to hilarious, from tolerant and compassionate to angry and snide, these poems show us the many parts of the poet’s life, with her different, age-centered reactions to and reflections on that life, in starkly different voices that come together, when read as a whole, in one essential, transcendent voice.”

—David Bachner, author of Just Then, Just There

“Ginnah Howard’s An Opera of Hankering is one of the most evocative collections of poems I’ve ever read. I am astounded by her creative use of simile and metaphor in such subtle ways to produce images and elicit emotions in these heartfelt, poignant poems. Hooray and three cheers for Ginnah and this fine keepsake collection.”

—Harry Barnes, author of the series Over the Barnes Bridge

“Ginnah Howard read many poems from this collection in our fireside salons at Women At Woodstock. Reading her words now, I hear her voice; its slight southern lilt, its warmth and wry humor as she shares her life, unvarnished. An Opera of Hankering lays bare the truth of all women’s lives.”

—Ann Voorhees Baker, author of “Midnight in
the Garden of Sid and Eva” and other short
stories, and founder, Women At Woodstock