The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas: Poems (Walt McDonald First-Book Series)

Yesterday's love returns as today's love song, and Cathy Smith Bowers signs her own superb versions with distinctive wisdom, grit, and remarkable range. Erotic of familial, happy or heartbroken, elegaic or hunted, these poems find their right shapes in the dramas of everyday speech and the pressures of rigorous craft. The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas is poetry in the Key of terrific. —David BakerThese are poems of passion and rage; of quiet reflection and of exhilaration. They express in precise language—whose impetus is the poet's clear vision—the deepest yearnings of ordinary people: young and old, health and infirm, they are all looking for, in a terrifyingly indifferent universe, their moment of perfect beauty, joy, or peace. In her poems, Cathy Smith offers us a rare glimpse of nature x-rayed to reveal its calcified skeleton, its black soul: "In the shortened days / the trees grow pornographic, / think their time is up, / last chance for love."Yet this world of betrayal is also a place where a few lucky ones can still be surprised by beauty: "like stars thrown out / against the night."In The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas Cathy Smith comes to terms with the power granted by pain and with the terrible beauty to found in ordinary lives. —Judith Ortiz CoferCathy Smith Bowers thinks in metaphor; her poems combine a measured, adult sadness with the exotic pleasure, first learned in childhood, of tracing connections and resemblances. And like a true poet she honors—and not only in her poem "The Flower We Could Not Name"—the considerable part of our experience that lies beyond the call of even her bright articulations. What a fine book she's given us! —William MatthewsCathy Smith Bowers was born and reared in Lancaster, South Carolina, where she attended the University of South Carolina at Lancaster. She went on to receive Bachelors of Arts and Masters of Arts and Teaching degrees in English from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She is a winner of the South Carolina Poetry Fellowship and the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers. She lives in Rock Hill and teaches English and Foundations of Liberal Learning at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.Cathy Smith Bowers' emergence as a poet has been astonishing in the degree that she has taken possession of loss and made it a gift, and she has done it everywhere with courageous wit and in language that sings as well as it talks. And what a journey this poetry marks. From the Carolina mill town of her birth to a Buddhist temple in Malaysia, she plots the cartography of a personal life in which we are made welcome by that luckiest empathy, style. These are poems that love us as well as themselves. To read them is to touch a life. —Rodney Jones