Empty Me Full: Poems by Catherine Abbey Hodges

Description

Empty Me Full is an invitation to intimate conversation with a wise and affectionate seeker. But Catherine Abbey Hodges is no common questioner. Hers is a wit-laced and vulnerable wondering as she looks back over a life-loss of parents and recollection of girlhood pleasures, long marriage and motherhood. Exhilarated by relationship with human, animal, earth and sky, in language honed with care and cadence, her surprising turns of thought and discovery deepen our shared humanity. Without being sentimental, the book is rich with sentiment. Without dictating belief, the collection inspires reverence for the greater-than-human. In poems that turn grief to awe and sadness to wonder, the poet celebrates our stunning, imperfect lives. When she allows, ‘It’s not a sad thing, / perhaps, to be always a bit sad’ we sigh into our shared frailty. And when she encourages ‘a nod, a long gaze, three deep bows, ‘ we comply.”

-Barbara Rockman, author of to cleave

“‘I sing of times trans-shifting, ‘ said Robert Herrick, and so does Catherine Abbey Hodges in her new collection, Empty Me Full. She mingles elegies of loss with skillful praise of tenuous beauties in ways that make the heart rejoice even as it keeps on aching. These are gorgeous and thoughtful poems, self-consistent but full of surprising meanders and turns. Of all the poets that I know, Hodges is one of the few I return to again and again for repose and nourishment. ‘Maybe time dreams us, ‘ she says. ‘Maybe it’s alright to rest.’”

-Paul J. Willis, author of Somewhere to Follow

“The poems in Catherine Abbey Hodges’ Empty Me Full ask deep and necessary questions of both the speaker and her readers. How to define clarity? What is sorrow, and why must we accept it? Who best explains faith? And even, ‘Does it matter?’ But everything matters to this poet, and she hungers for a response, if not an easy resolution; ‘Spendthrift / world, it’s me again, listening hard, ‘ she writes. This beautifully paced book is a lovely, inviting incantation to notice, to be aware, to live this world ‘a little more awake, ‘ and to always query, ‘how did we / get here? And can we stay forever?’”

-Jen Karetnick, author of Inheritance with a High Error Rate

“In Empty Me Full, Catherine Abbey Hodges tenderly interrogates the workings of time. She travels with remarkable ease through the liminal corridors between life and death, how we remember, and what we can know. ‘What else don’t we know?’ asks the book’s first poem. The answer: ‘Almost / everything.’ Her poetry carries in it a stillness that takes you into a brief respite of calm. Even death seems calm-recent death of her mother, a visitation from her dead father, the death of the stars. ‘Because the end hovers, ‘ she writes, ‘I think we should kiss // and kiss and kiss….’”

-Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release from the Beginning of the World