Neil Creighton

Loving Leah Neil Creighton

Neil Creighton's fine collection, Loving Leah, with its echoes of Lear and white-hot emotional center, is a symphony in a wounded key. Leah's daughter Cordelia confronts her mother's death and betrayal as she struggles back, through memory and nature's healing power, to the deep love that informed her childhood world. Creighton masterfully captures the sorrow of watching a beloved parent shrink away under the baleful influence of selfish daughters and he renders Leah's death scene with great power. You will not come away from this work unmoved, and you will be awed by the sense of hard-earned regeneration.

Steve Klepetar, author of fourteen poetry collections, including The Li Bo Poems and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto

If Loving Leah puts you in mind of King Lear, it's quite intentional. Finding forgiveness within ourselves has never been easy. The hurt, the heavy heart, the torn-fabric of lives once intimately connected--all we believed ourselves to be must be faced and measured. This remarkable sequence of poems takes the reader down the entire rock-strewn and sometimes unnerving path. In the chapbook's concluding poem, "Tapestry," Creighton comes to the final letting go, which might, at last, allow for loving Leah again. You'll be moved, and changed, as much by Creighton's journey, as the arrival. Alan Walowitz, author of Exactly Like Love and The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems

Neil Creighton's gifts for incarnating feeling in memorable language, for sharp observation and clear-eyed honesty, are on glorious display in Loving Leah, a cycle of poems at once intimately personal and lamentably universal. Here Lear is Leah, an aging mother fading into fear and institutional care. The poet fills the role of Cordelia, loving, perplexed, unjustly excluded, forgiving. The story behind these poems is characterized by powerful emotional restraint, like a coiled spring. Moving back and forth over time, Loving Leah becomes a miniature saga with the poems carefully disposed into an arc of loss, mourning, resentment, dismay, grief, secrecy, guilt, acceptance. The residue is love. Robert Wexelblatt, whose works include Hsi-wei Tales and Girl Asleep and Other Poems