Mary Ellen Geer’s latest poetry collection, The Unbearable Shortness of Summer (2022), is wide-ranging, including poems about the consolations and mysteries of the natural world, the loss of a mother and sister, family houses, and the changes brought about by the pandemic. These poems are accessible, but they often lead the reader to unexpected places. The book is available by ordering from this website via PayPal, or send an email to maryellengeer@comcast.net to ask about other methods of ordering.
Mary Ellen Geer is a Boston-area poet and editor who worked for many years at Harvard University Press. She is the author of three previous chapbooks: At the Edge of the Known World, Life / Afterlife, and The Lost and the Found. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Leon Literary Review, The Comstock Review, Slant, and The Charles River Review, and she is a past winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Boyle/Farber Award.
The Unbearable Shortness of Summer
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The Lost and the Found
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“This poet beautifully transforms the daily evanescences and deaths big and small—the lost—by
forming trysts with the unfurling natural world—the found.”
–Suzanne E. Berger
At the Edge of the Known World
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“Seeking connection between the deep past and the imagined future, the dead and the living, waking and dreaming, Mary Ellen Geer moves beyond the edge of the known world in each of these prescient poems. The poet’s repeated images of water, human connection, and the natural world are especially resonant. As a sequence of poems, this is gorgeously crafted.”
–Susan Carlisle
Life/Afterlife
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“The precision restlessness of Geer’s poems—all luminous sound and gesture—and their perceptions of lonely loveliness in the half-seen and yearned-toward, will make these poems get under your skin.”
–Daisy Fried
The World Tree
A huge ash tree rotates slowly
just outside our bedroom window,
so close the ends of the lower branches
touch the glass; sometimes we hear
faint music when they scrape
against the pane. You could easily think
the tree isn’t moving at all, so slow
is its rotation, but if you stand very still
you can feel the slight disturbance
it makes in the air. Every night
it carries away the day’s raw scraps—
unfinished things we’ve written,
untruths spoken in careless moments,
unbearable events we’ve heard about
on the news, our bottled-up anger
and grief. Every morning
we feel lighter, able to begin again.
We take care of it as best we can,
watering the ground during droughts,
checking its leaves for blight.
We know how much depends on it.
If its leaves shrivel, if its roots wither,
if its motion stops, nothing will be the same—
one day we’ll wake up, look out our window,
and see the red-tailed hawk,
feathers caught in the branches,
no longer able to fly.
–from Life/Afterlife