Not My First Walk on the Moon - Paperback

by Linda Hillman Chayes (Author)

Not My First Walk on the Moon takes the reader on a journey through time and geographies. It moves through seasons and generations, through cityscapes, seashore, barrier islands, and backyards. The poems reflect on loss and how it reverberates throughout a lifetime including the tiny but continual losses of aging. They also celebrate moments of joy and awe inspired by breeze, light and love. Many of the poems use a framework of visual art and imagery-including a mother's love of Turner's Paintings of the Sea at Margate, a crime scene photo in which the facts fail to tell the story, and a portrait of a family leaving Rockaway beach in late afternoon. The moon slips in and out these poems but takes center stage in one as the author recalls watching the 1969 moon landing and imagines her very own walk on the "moon's luminescent dustscape".