Description: Good Places traces a midlife journey between beloved places, a journey of spiritual transformation. The poems attend to images from ordinary daily life, finding there a celebration of life's seasons, losses and spiritual surprises.
Brief description: Trained as an academic, Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) has read and studied poetry for most of her life, writing a scholarly book and many articles on the work of the Anglo Welsh Catholic poet and artist David Jones . She began writing poetry herself at mid-life and has found that the practice of poetry has become a spiritual practice of attention, enabling her to dwell deeply in the richness and the challenges of life, loss, relationships and transitions. In her first volume of poems, Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture (2003), she explores the way that stories from the Bible, especially (though not exclusively) the New Testament, have come alive for her and illuminated important life experiences. In Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life, also published by Finishing Line Press, the poetry takes her through the years of child-rearing, exploring along the way themes of healing, celebration, loss and letting go. The current volume, Good Places, traces a physical journey between places, a journey that quietly becomes a time of spiritual transformation. Leaving an old home and moving to a new, these poems explore the experience of being fully present in a place, finding in the trees, the garden, the birds, light and interior spaces of an old home and a new home images for losses and the discoveries, the turnings and the seasons of life.
Review Quotes: There is a sacramental light that inhabits all of Kathy Staudt's poems. Place is important to Kathy, whether it be a small patio filled with birdsong, the kitchen in candlelight, or a dark church. She writes in luminous detail about the ordinary contained in these places. She welcomes us to experience the changing seasons of a lifetime, motherhood, marriage, moving to a new home through the changing seasons of the natural world. We are drawn into our connectedness to each other and creation with stunning images of trees and birds and sky. For Kathy, the seasons are all grace filled whether they be seasons of joy or sorrow, darkness or light. Her poetry reminds us of what it means to be present to both the good and the bad weather of our lives for all that they can show us about the blessing of being alive. -Emily Blair Stribling, author of The Mercy of Light