Stopping On the Bridge

Dianne Ashley's poems find their metaphorical center in the marshland of Cape Cod. This is a world the poet knows intimately and for which she cares greatly. Such commitment carries over into this poet's writing about everyday life, world politics, grandchildren, peace vigils, and romantic love. Everywhere in these poems a striving for justice twines with a striving for vitality and acceptance in the moment, as well as gratitude to the earth itself. That's the alleviating gift that Ashley offers her readers too, as her sensuous and tonally vibrant free verse line reflects and embodies passionate attention to the human and non-human world alike.

Peter Campion is the author of three collections of poetry and also Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry

In this lovely collection, Dianne Ashley invites us to stop with her and explore the bridge of life, which is finite. Terrible, but also breathtaking; where There is more to know than time to learn and Every road has a fork and an end. The poems range from the mystery-maze of poignant childhood memories through the wonders she finds in nature to the devastations of politics and extinction-where she proposes a Tomb of the Unknown Migrant. In a lyrical voice, Ashley conveys the human condition as she looks towards death and prays to be transformed into a new wild biology. These are poems to stop and savor: Enjoy!

Chuck Madansky is the author of the poetry collection Some Days the Spoons Talk Back

Oil spills, children at play, paeans to marsh life and marsh stinks, the astonishments of the natural world, bearing witness in East Jerusalem, bearing witness to the death of a loved one from COVID, the pleasures and loneliness of human relation. Dianne Ashley moves lithely from the playful to the elegiac to the worried, weary and full of wonder. This book is a love letter to places (Cape Cod, Wisconsin, more), to family, to a world both lovely and broken, and to being able to live a life of which one can say, as Ashley writes, this joy was enough.

Daisey Fried is the author of three collections of poetry including Women's Poetry