Elizabeth M Rosenow

Sandhill Mist Elizabeth M Rosenow

Sandhill Mist- Seasons on a Centennial Farm is a book of poems about the way the cycle of the seasons affects every facet of life on a homestead. It covers the burgeoning of spring, the heat and span of summer, harvest, and the winter spent most of the time indoors. Poetry is a successful vehicle for describing these changes.
------------ In her poem "Building Up the Barn," Elizabeth Rosenow writes, "where the feather lay/beneath the store of hay..." This image embodies Sandhill Mist, Rosenow's hardscrabble collection where the unexpected and easily overlooked is sometimes discovered within the never-ending labor required on a working farm. These poems reveal each day as anything but pastoral. This is work. Hard, hard work. The moments of relief appear as unlikely as the appearance of that feather. Here everything "proceeds the way/interrupted by death, planned or otherwise/as time goes on as it is wont to do." W. C. Williams wrote that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow. True. And it would be well for all of us to enter the world of Rosenow's poems where we would realize that our lives depend upon those who live the "tyranny of barnyards," who go on "long after the hay has lost its summer sweetness." --Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, co-recipient of the Indie/Foreword Reviews' award for 2014's best book of poetry. In Sandhill Mist: Seasons on a Centennial Farm, Elizabeth Rosenow articulates the many riches of living in an intimate relationship with the land, animals, weather and seasons where "we are the future and the past, blurring the present in our motion through it; a hummingbird in the spray of a garden hose; a molting hen with the eggs of tomorrow already in her; a sheep, rooing yesterday's wool over the soft and springy fleece of tomorrow." In language as vivid and detailed as it is experienced and thoughtful, these poems reflect the abundance of the earth's wild beauty and grow together into a memorable and moving experience of the power of place, "reminders of hard work, hardships and joy." Robert Haight