These Things Remaining - Poetry by Mary Dederer

Publication Date: December 1, 2021

Paperback, 72 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-96-0

$22.50 retail, 17.50 from publisher

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Among the “things remaining” in Mary Dederer’s debut poetry collection are memories, reveries, and dreams – as in the opening poem is which a bird dreams in a tree that is also dreaming, each of them in this way creating worlds. Which is what these poems do, dreaming worlds into being. In another poem she recalls her discover that a 3rd grade classmate’s life was “so different from what I’d ever imagined.” That early acquired wisdom serves her well here, as she bridges lives, showing us her world, while inviting us to experience our own more mindfully. Her title poem relates another bit of wisdom gained upon the death of her father, of coming to “rest with the world / on the new terms death / and grief had made.” There is sorrow and tragedy in that world, yes, but also beauty, hope, and even joy. The seeming simplicity of these poems is deceptive, even sly. They will remain with you long after reading.

Praise for Mary Dederer & The Things Remaining

These are fine poems. Some of them are about small things—a bee sipping from a leaf. Some are about immensities—life, death, the earth as our “dearest lover.” All of them are precise and beautiful. Together, they ring like a bell in the evening, heard from across a field.

— Jeanne DuPrau, author of Earth House & The City of Ember series

Mary Dederer’s poems live on the cusp. How easily she rides that shoreline, carrying us with her, as she slips into and out of reality and dream, love and loss, desire and contentment, this world and others beyond our ken. Language, the vessel of these poems, is detailed and carefully deployed with attention to its music to create a thought, an image, a season:

Somewhere the bird body knows / leaves are growing, slightly / trembling, the tree is / dreaming wordlessly saying / leaves, saying leaves in its sleep, / to make a world.

—Patricia Machmiller, author of Zigzag of the Dragonfly: Writing the Haiku Way

Reading these poems is like sitting across a table from a wise, thoughtful friend who speaks quietly and confidingly, so you find yourself leaning in so as not to miss a word, or phrase, or surprisingly apt image:

Their faces lighten and darken with meaning / like hills under passing clouds.

So too the poems lighten with pleasure in this world—how things look, taste, feel, and change even as we perceive them—and darken with the apprehension of what it will be to leave it. Many poems hover over the porous borders between life and death, but always in the background, no matter what the focus, is a bee-like murmur of joy. The joy is infectious. You will get up from this book as from the best meals, deeply satisfied and wanting more.

—Patrick Daly, author of Playing with Fire & Grief and Horses

Mary Dederer’s first volume of poetry reveals a complex, refined and delicate sensibility as well as a keen and clear-eyed intelligence.

—Aneel Bisht, author of Diary of a Nainital Garden & a series of children’s books

About the Author

Mary Dederer was born in St. Louis and at thirteen moved to Stockton, California, where she went to high school. After attending Stanford, she never left the Bay Area, teaching at the old Mountain View High School, at Los Altos High School, and at the new Mountain View High School. In 1986, she began teaching writing at San Jose State and worked with California Poets in the Schools. In 2003, she retired from teaching and worked part-time in a used bookstore and as a rater of online essay tests. In 2004, she was invited to join a poetry group and has been enjoying their company and their poetry ever since. This is her first book.