About this item
Langley offers comfort and encouragement to those struggling with recent loss or grief, helping them find language for complex emotions, and open their hearts through poetry.Send My Roots Rain is a companion full of stories - sometimes wry and funny, always observant and accepting - for letting grief unfold and teach us. Langley invites a keen awareness that the passage through grief is the navigation of a narrow strait, requiring patience, skill, and worthy companions. These poems can be those companions on the journey.Langley has carefully selected 60 poems and arranged them in a meaningful arc, beginning with the shock of early grief, leading through a sensitive exploration of a new inner space. She introduces each section, encouraging the ongoing embrace of the healing power of poems, writing, and entry into the grieving process.
About the Author
The Unvarnished Kim LangleyA package arrived from California (a mythical land to a girl from Pittsburgh) when I turned eight. Aunt Viola Buehler had mailed Louis Untermeyer's The Golden Treasury of Poetry. When not being told to get off the couch and get my nose OUT of that book, I was reading the good stuff over and over, everything from nonsense verses, to ballads, and of course The Highwayman. From The Highwayman I learned that the moon could be "a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas". The rest was history.Fast forward 30 plus years, and I am leading poetry circles for mindful conversation. Over and over people entered with their shoulders hunched up around their ears, cowering and fearful that they wouldn't get it. "I don't understand poetry. I just came because my friend brought me." Then 2 hours later they exit wheedling the date of the next gathering from me and asking "When can we do this again!? "Because I am not entirely clueless, my heart could not help but notice the joy of participants integrating parts of the self, and finding words for thoughts and feeling that they had been unable to express.Finding myself at a conference on using poetry in ministry, I was sitting with strangers around the lunch table when someone asked-- "What brings you here? " I rattled on about poetry circles and the alchemy that happens there, and she popped the question: "Do you have any poems about grief? " Do I have any poems about grief! One of the lame jokes among poets is that every poem ever written could be lumped under five themes, and one of those is grief. So yes. She turned out to be a representative of Paraclete Press.That's when Send My Roots Rain was born.Kim lives in Ohio with her family of teachers, a librarian and business owner, a software engineer.When not leading poetry circles through www.WordSPA.net, or chained to the laptop, she's self employed as a speaker and coach at www.KimLangley.net. She enjoys a good workout in her huge flower garden, and sneaking treats to Tucker, the doggie who wooed and won her heart.
