The Farmgirl Poems
by Elizabeth Oakes
Category: Poetry

In tHE FARMGIRL POEMS, winner of the 2004 Pearl Poetry Prize, Elizabeth Oakes looks back to the mid-twentieth century and her childhood on a farm in rural Kentucky, to that land now only in my memory. That land becomes a vital, living force in these poems, inseparable from everything that lives and grows there and from the people who work and draw sustenance from it: her father who took the world, slit it open, and gave it to us, her mother whose hands were folded leaves that opened and bore and gave. Taking us back to the source of all that feeds and sustains us, Oakes shows us the passing of an American way of life with a straight-forward simplicity that's as genuine and powerful as it is moving. --Pearl Editions.