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Paperback Details
  • 11/2021
  • 9781639880768 1639880763
  • 46 pages
  • $15.99
Diana Howard
Author
Winter Solstice: A Memoir in Poetry
Diana Howard, author
We take our memory for granted. Dementia will steal it in ways most of us could never imagine. Winter Solstice by Diana Howard burrows deep into the heart-rendering poetic journey of a daughter trying to love and help her mother who is slowly losing her memory. Through poems and vignettes written over a period of 15 years, the reader will enter a world of denial, confusion, shame, fear, humor, sacrifice, patience and love - finding solace and empathy with an experience many of us go through, yet struggle to find words to describe.
Reviews
This haunting, moving collection of poetry about a daughter's journey in caretaking her mother through her last years, as she suffers from dementia, dives deep into the heart of the central relationship and the heartbreak of watching a loved one lose not only their memory, but themselves and all those who love them. Poet and children’s author Howard writes with raw honesty but also empathy and wisdom, pinpointing in precise, resonant language the grief of watching a parent suffer from a tragic illness of the mind. In "Notes to Self,” Howard explores, with pained humor, the process of making signs to remind her mother how to pay bills, take meds, and work the television. Next on the Howard’s to-do list, though: “Remind her to look at the signs.” Not long after that: “Learn how to grieve.”

Told in four parts, as the years tick by, Howard takes the reader on a journey through prose and free verse that gives an in-depth insight on life with dementia. families. In "Going Home,” Howard makes great use of nuanced repetition, imagery, and personification on the subject of returning to her mother's home. As she treads the delicate waters of the role reversal of child and parent, each poem builds upon the next, taking the reader on a moving journey of mother and daughter navigating a difficult diagnosis and illness. In "Remembering,” Howard employs quotes from her mother while thinking back on individual stages of her understanding of her mother's dementia.

Focusing on one daughter's experience, Howard achieves a more universal resonance, as even readers not steeped in contemporary poetry will find much to relate to Howard’s inviting considerations of grief, growing older, and incidents like the moment when her mother believes she sees a long-dead loved one. A brief, tightly focused collection that can be read in one sitting or savored and explored over time, Winter Solstice will elicit deep thought and feeling from its readers.

Takeaway: This moving, haunting memoir in poetry is universal in it's themes of grief, loss, and the passage of time.

Great for fans of: Caitlin Kelly’s The Words I Wish I Said, Sonia Sanchez’s Morning Haiku.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 11/2021
  • 9781639880768 1639880763
  • 46 pages
  • $15.99
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