Stealing the Children

Carolyne Wright

This was the first collection of poems by Carolyne Wright. She is from Seattle, Washington, and received her MA in Creative Writing and her Doctor of Arts both from Syracuse University. She writes of the west and of relationships, both with an extraordinary sense of physical space. She writes of the dynamic between people, as they move together and come apart. There is the sense that much of this collection is autobiographical, yet she writes not of specifics, named and fenced off, but how these situations meld into what we all experience as people. Many of the poems express the space of the west—Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada…with a beauty and starkness that accurately captures the feel of the landscape.

Carolyne Wright received an MA in Creative Writing and a Doctor of Arts both from Syracuse University. Her most recent collection, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), was a finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has recently returned to her native Seattle, and serves on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, the Richard Hugo House, and the Board of Directors of AWP.

A sample poem from the book

Pater Familias

The air always filled with the word

No. Weekends, he dozed before the T.V. set,

slouched downstairs to open drawers;

sent up, through the vents, the glass's clink

against the bottle. We were too small

to stand up to dictums issued

from the breakfast throne. Mother's shoulders

rounded under his glare—truncated in love

she was, like a cry cut off. She slipped us

dollar bills, wheedled riding lessons,

concert seats, treats that tried to fill

the holes. Falling asleep, our shoulders

twitched, rejecting everything he said:

whisperings at midnight, audible shrugs,

evasions stumbling down the steps

to face up to just one more round....

The red face fades.

The first decades recede like a hairline.

colleagues tell us we're successes,

come over the landscaped hills of circumstance

to freer pasture: concert grands, podiums

pounded so hard they stand up to poems,

real friends. Down the old street,

mother's still rounded shouldered, waits

for phone calls or our letters,

cakes she bakes for our arrivals

getting smaller every year.