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Carolyn Dahl Artist and Author

A Muddy Kind of Love

Poems

by Carolyn Dahl
Muddy Love Book Cover

Description

A young girl dreams of becoming a circus performer and riding pink elephants in a sequined gown. A young boy hopes to use magic, a divining rod, to find his grandfather's trunk of gold buried on their land, so family stories say. But their exotic dreams eventually turn into the simpler life of farmers, though their simple life is never simple.

Their many stories are told in poems with achingly and powerfully expressive language in Carolyn Dahl's chapbook, "A Muddy Kind of Love." The author truly loves these people and so will the reader as she pays tribute to their disappearing lifestyles, their hardships and sorrows (a daughter feeds her grief with her mother's canned grape jelly), and their respectful relationships with animals (a man deals with his aging, long-faithful draft horse).

Over the years, they come to understand that the land is their real gold. That what they see in their common, everyday work life is as curious (a panther prowling corn fields, frogs popping in the creek), and as beautiful (red snow, fish bones hanging in trees like lace) as any staged circus performer's life.
Softcover, 40 pages,
Letterpress-Printed, Signed & Numbered Edition, North Dakota State University Press
ISBN: 978-1-946163-29-5
LCCN: 2020948564
$30.00
In this poem-video, Carolyn reads The Weight of Illusions, the first poem in "A Muddy Kind of Love".
(Video created by Margo Stutts Toombs.)


What People are Saying about "A Muddy Kind of Love"

Carolyn Dahl combines her artist's eye with poetry's language, crafting highly visual poems. She delivers a refined sense of wonder, igniting vestiges of magic. Without fanfare, she shares profound insights, gently deposited on the page. If you are a reader who underlines and makes notes in the margins, you'll likely find yourself doing that with every poem.

—Fran Sanders, Director, Public Poetry


"A Muddy Kind of Love" opens with The Weight of Illusions, a poem that wisely prepares the reader for the kind of balance between inner and outer vision that Carolyn Dahl so deftly interweaves in this collection. A poet of unflinching vision, Dahl observes with keen clarity the rich color, texture, and motion of midwestern farmland and, simultaneously, becomes the illusionist who transforms that landscape on behalf of the metaphorical life that inhabits us. Dahl's eye moves from the bodies of circus elephants painted a dazzling pink, to the bodies of creek frogs inflated like green balloons, to the concluding image of a jar of mud filled with glittering constellations. These poems are just such stars. Their exquisite images illuminate what might at first appear as the prosaic nature of our daily lives but, in Dahl's hands, become talismans of the poet's reverence for nature — images that invite the reader to enter an interior universe pulsing with tenderness, empathy, love.

—Robin Davidson, 2015 - 2017 Houston Poet Laureate




To purchase "A Muddy Kind of Love", contact Carolyn at Dahlstudio@aol.com.

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Dahlstudio@aol.com.