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Parallel Press Publishes Late Life Happiness
Posted 03/24/2010
MADISON, Wis.-Poems in the latest Parallel Press chapbook Late Life Happiness by Barbara L. Greenberg, define the sensibilities of a woman “alone, and long past seventy.” She provides a retrospective look at life from an elderly woman’s viewpoint and looks to a future in which she will be “serving the gods / at the unification banquet / to be announced soon.” Greenberg presents herself as an applicant to the Methuselah Institute, represents herself as a faith healer, choreographs a dramatic visit from an old friend, and writes and e-mail to her dead husband, whose images have taken over her computer. Although the poems—that include eight sonnets, two villanelles, and a rondeau—are formal in design, they are at their core irreverent 
and sometimes whimsical.
Barbara L. Greenberg is the author of The Spoils of August (1974), The Never-not Sonnets (1989), What Nell Knows (1997), and Fire Drills: Stories (1982). She has taught creative writing in the Boston area and was an originating faculty member of the MFA writing programs at Goddard and Warren Wilson colleges. More recently she has been affiliated with the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection for her chapbook, Late Life Happiness:
All That Remains
All that remains to be done now is the pruning
which comforts me and is a source of pleasure.
I like the act of fracturing twigs and branches
with or without blossoms, with or without bird nests.
When a strangulating vine can’t be uprooted
I like uncoiling it and scissoring it off
and watching it expire: Die, worm, die!
I like forcing the lopper to bite the deadwood,
incising pockets of air in blueberry bushes,
redesigning wind-wracked junipers. They serve
as mourners in the field, bending and keening
for mother’s sake, and father’s sake, and sister’s...
Sister is in the ground. Her rooms are empty.
Clouds that overlaid her life drift in and out.
