Mothers' Trails

In Mothers Trails Holly Guran follows many paths to a midway place between generations, between life s beginnings and endings, as she seeks to retrieve whatever memory loses/ on our way from here to there. In language both fresh and precise, tender and unflinching, she can develop a whole social history from the feel of a handkerchief bag, its voices in the velvet, and write with honesty of alcoholism, poverty, and sexual abuse. But it is as daughter, mother and grandmother that Guran truly becomes the figure on the night window, both reflection and actuality, past and future. Her poems give eloquence to that figure.