HOME PLACE AND OTHER POEMS - by Sheila Bucy Potter

Publication Date: 2003
Paperback, 144 pages
ISBN 0-9721144-0-8

In her first collection of poetry, Sheila Bucy Potter breathes new life into traditional narrative form with her verse cycle, “Home Place.” The title work is a dialogue between a farmer and a woman who buys the adjoining farm because, she says,

I’ve lived in my cage a very long time
And I wanted some spaces around.

As his initial doubts about her give way to hard-won respect and eventual love, these two people, both damaged by life, find a new chance through her trials and small triumphs.

Praised by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Richard Taylor as “Frost with less irony and more heart,” these poems celebrate the ageless redemptive power of nature, the unexpected possibility of love, and, in unabashed and unadorned terms, virtue.

The balance of poems in the collection are by turns confessional and reflective, ranging over themes personal and mythic, concluding with the powerfully drawn “Reflection of 1968,” a cry of a generation still yearning for form within formlessness, meaning out of randomness, a desire that ultimately informs and gives context to all of the poems gathered here.