She Wore Emerald Then

She Wore Emerald Then is an e-chapbook and paperback published by Amazon's CreateSpace.com.

Co-authored by award-winning poets Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Click here to purchase Cherished Pulse co-authored by Magdalena Ball. Paintings by Vicki Thomas.

Reflections on Motherhood

By Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson with photography by May Lattanzio

Moods of Motherhood: thirty poems by award-winning poets Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson, with original photography by May Lattanzio. A beautifully presented, tender and strikingly original gift book, ideal for Mother's Day or any day when you want to celebrate the notion of motherhood in its broadest sense. Share this collection with someone you love.

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry (including this year's Roland Robinson literary award), and fiction. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything and two other poetry chapbooks Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse. She runs a monthly radio program podcast www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's first novel, This is the Place, and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered are both award-winners. Her fiction, nonfiction and poems appear in national magazines, anthologies and review journals. She speaks on culture, tolerance, writing and promotion and has appeared on TV and hundreds of radio stations nationwide. She is an instructor for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and has shared her expertise at venues like San Diego State's world renowned Writers' Conference, Dayton University's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop and SPAN's (Small Publishers Association of North America) annual conference. Carolyn was recently awarded Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment by the California Legislature; her home town's Character and Ethics Commission honored her for her work on promoting tolerance and the Pasadena Weekly named her to their list of "San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen" for literary activism. Her nitty-gritty how-to book, The Frugal Book Promoter won USA Book News' Best Professional Book 2004 and her chapbook of poetry, Tracings, was honored by the Military Writers' Society of America for excellence. It is now available from Finishing Line Press and Amazon. Her literary Web site is on part of this site on this page: http://carolynhoward-johnson.com.

To buy a copy, just click the purchasing link https://www.createspace.com/3347966. then click on the Add to Cart button, fill in check out information and that's it. Watch for it soon on Amazon, as well. Or purchase at Amazon.

Sample Poems from She Wore Emerald Then

Mother’s Bed

by Magdalena Ball

In the restless night

when mortality lurks in every shadow

the blanket won’t cover your fear

and morning is a half-forgotten dream

vague and uncertain,

slink into my bed

the pillow holds a mother’s secret

whispered charm

you can sink your head into.

There are no demons here;

no whirlwind of memory and anticipation clouding

sleep

only eternal warmth

a shared space

free from the ticking illusion

of time, motion, and change.

Here, where you are always welcome

nothing matters

except this peace

this place

containing every possible now.

Could It Have Been Otherwise?

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

At eighty-eight, she (tired

of the twenty first century

before it has become school

age) pleads, weary

before dinner, eyes

too weak to read.

I turn on the TV,

grab a VCR to cheer

her. I'm too slow, way

too slow. Instead of You're lookin’

swell, Dolly, she is treated

to Aulnay-sous-Bois'

streets aflame, backlash,

ghetto or banlieues

nothing new

in new millennium.

REVIEWS

She Wore Emerald Then

Reviewed by Kristin Johnson, founder of Warrior Poets

"What relationship is more complex or more elemental than the mother-child bond? Abraham Lincoln said, 'All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.' Toni Morrison wrote, 'Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown?What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.'

Both of those quotes, as well as one by Honore de Balzac at the beginning of SHE WORE EMERALD THEN, perfectly describe this collection of poems by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball---poetry that catches at your soul. Both of them reprise their poems from Ball's QUARK SOUP, Howard-Johnson's TRACINGS, and their joint collection, CHERISHED PULSE. Fans of CHERISHED PULSE will be pleased to learn that the poets continue to write poems that don't sound either like banal Hallmark cards or the bitter-at-dysfunctional-family jeremiads that habitually torture MFA writing workshop participants.

http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/quarkindex.htm

That would be perfect. Or you could just have the text:

The two poets complement each other (with words accompanied by stunning photography by May Lattanzio). The opus covers both the grand sweep of the birth of all universal life and the private universe populated by only an adult daughter watching her mother struggle to eat dinner and remembering how her mother washed her one slip. While Ball explores the cosmic continuum and traces us all back to the mother spark that set the stars burning, Howard-Johnson concentrates her portraiture on the deeply personal. But Ball also talks about the oxytocin haze of giving birth and her mother vomiting from cancer drugs. To quote the last poem in the collection, 'Hallmark Couldn't Possibly Get This Right.' When you read about the tough love of the universe or Ball's sienna childhood photograph or Howard-Johnson's mother forgetting her name, you want to cry and hug your mother (and your children, if you have them), because they capture the eternal tug of war between joy and sorrow in the mother-child bond."--Kristin Johnson, poet, author, screenwriter and founder of the Poet Warrior Project, http://poetwarriorproject.blogspot.com

Word Art from She Wore Emerald Then of the poem "Hall Mark Couldn't Possibly Have Gotten This Right" created by www.wordle.net Tip: This service is free. Any poet may use it. (-:

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She Wore Emerald Then – Reflections on Mothers and Motherhood

Reviewed by Helena Harper

This is a collection of poetry that movingly illustrates many aspects of motherhood and, if you are a poetry lover, there is much that you will find appealing and thought-provoking. In the first half of the book, the poems by Magdalena Ball have a cosmic quality to them and some wonderful imagery. In the poem 'Coil of Life', for example, giving birth is described as the 'Big Bang' and in 'Assault by a Black Hole', the reader is taken on a journey from the sublime to the commonplace and you can't help but smile:

A powerful jet from a black hole

is blasting nearby galaxy 3C321

with outrageous galactic violence

x-rays, gamma rays

particles travelling the speed of light

tearing ozone layers

destroying alien life forms

and breeding new star systems

a million primordial sons

in the lethal pummelling.

Talk about tough love.

In the face of that million year

assault

(a fraction of the system’s lifetime)

I suppose I have no right

to complain

about one smart, sharp smack

sent my way

to facilitate a few manners.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poems have, by contrast, a homely down-to-earthness which also appeals. I loved her description of dandelion petals in the poem 'Dandelions in Autumn':

Yellow petals, pollen-soft

like monarchs' wings.

Little lions' manes

like illustrations in childrens'

books, not like roaring

Serengeti cats

or the MGM logo lion, harmless

these. I pick them, bunch them,

hold them under Mama's chin

to see if they light her throat

yellow, and if they do, delight!

In the poem 'Musing Over a New Calendar', the author reflects on the passage of time - how there is still so much she wants to do and see, yet her ageing mother is 'alone, rejecting all but her home'. I felt the author's pain in these lines as I did in the poem 'Mother and Daughter' where she describes her job of 'mothering again', but this time it is not her children who need her help but her own elderly mother:

...I take over seatbelt

duties, step ahead of her then stop,

reluctant for her to know she's slow.

We all forget names, I say as numb

moves from hand to heart

because it is my name she has forgotten.

Yet, despite such painful memories and associations, perhaps the strongest is the 'eternal warmth' of our mother's bed – as Ms. Ball puts it – 'a shared space/ free from the ticking illusion/ of time, motion and change./ Here, where you are always welcome/ nothing matters/ except this peace/ this place/ containing every possible now.'

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Reviewed by Helena Harper, poet and author of "It's a Teacher's Life...!,"

She Wore Emerald Then

Reflections on Motherhood

Could It Have Been Otherwise?

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

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