Description
New in the California Poets Series, Rosa Mundi is a vibrant collection from Ventura County’s Poet Laureate.
Mary Ann McFadden is extraordinary, a master of words and artifice from whom to study and learn. If the reader is looking for insights into the state of human affairs after these sev-eral thousand years, it is here. If the reader is looking for ways webs of blood weave families across generations, it is here. If the reader is looking for confirmation that lives are complicated, that love, though necessary, is elusive and definitions hard to pin down, it is here. If the reader is looking for affirmation of their feelings of foreboding about the slide of the natural and political worlds, it is here. If the reader is looking for proof of the will to go on against soaring odds, it is here. And if the reader is looking for expression of all of this in an original, stunning, memorable language, that magic is here also. The poems in Rosa Mundi encompass the essence of how great language strikes the visceral human core.
—David Oliveira, author of Still Life With Coffee (Brandenburg Press)
I find these poems blessing and sustenance. They locate, they praise the Rose of the World that unfurls in this life, in this broken and breathtaking world that we have inherited and that we go on making. “Tell me, Love” Mary Ann McFadden writes, “where is the source of what’s best in us?” Her poems know how to answer. I prize McFadden’s bracing voice, clear eye, humor, passion, humanity. I love the way she puts a poem together, Rosa Mundi is luminous.
—Lisa Coffman, author of Likely (Kent State University Press)
Mary Ann McFadden is the current Ventura County Poet Laureate. Her first book, Eye of the Blackbird, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, 1995. Her second book, Devil, Dear, was published by Alice James Books in 2014. She has been published in a range of journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Kayak, The American Voice, Nimrod, Bloom, Green Mountains Review, and Psychology Tomorrow. Her poems have been anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and spent six glorious weeks among the musicians and painters and writers there. Her first great teacher was Carolyn Kizer, who tutored her on Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke, especially. She received her MFA from NYU where her teachers were Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Yehuda Amichai, among others. In 2005, she had several poems set to music and performed at Carnegie Hall.
