Silk
About this ebook
Like a bolt of fabric unrolling, each one of these poems scrolls from one to the next, “one long sigh of truth / which in time unfurls.” The epigraph of the first poem, “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown” could be an epigraph for the entire book, as each poem unfolds into the next one, the whole becoming more than the sum of its parts. Reed is obsessed (in a good way) with silk and its various uses, from parachutes to biomedical batteries. She treats her subject in a variety of forms (pantoum, ghazal, villanelle), but always keeps her eyes on the luminous thread, spun from unraveled cocoons:
“Silk. Say it again and again,
and yards of shimmering fabric,
undulations of light,
rivers of color in shades of jewels
slip over your shoulders,”
—Barbara Crooker, author of The Book of Kells and Some Glad Morning
In the poems of Silk, Clela Reed offers a fascinating view of the history and cultural importance of silk through the ages, interwoven with personal details and insight. Her poems reflect an astonishing range of poetic forms, a fine sensitivity to the economic aspects of silk, the wealth and power it signifies, and its adornment of the human form. —Hugh Ruppersburg, author of books and articles on American
literature and film and editor of the Georgia Voices literary anthologies
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About the author
Clela Dyess Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry: Books: Dancing on the Rim (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2009) and The Hero of the Revolution Serves Us Tea (Negative Capability Press, 2014), Or Current Resident (Aldrich Press, 2019). Chapbooks: Bloodline (Evening Street Press, 2009), Of Root and Sky (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Word Bully (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), Helen Kay Chapbook winner. She has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, The Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, and many others. When not traveling or shooing deer from her yard, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.
