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Between Gone and Everlasting (2024)
Danita Dodson writes with emotive transparency about loss, the passing of generations, and the love of a father whose memory becomes a source of light after his death. Between Gone and Everlasting pans the perimeters of mourning with a phenomenal scope: heartrending reflections on grief, tender odes of remembrance, stunning elegies about Appalachia's fading past, and stirring psalms of spiritual awakening amid loss. Gracefully illustrating how the griever inhabits the umbral space between lamenting the gone and celebrating the everlasting, Dodson examines a central paradox: the irrevocable absence of the departed illuminates that which remains. In these poems, the past echoes inside the present with song-like rhythms, intricately threaded together with a warmth reminiscent of the quilts she describes. As the speaker commemorates her father's presence in rural East Tennessee, she gathers images rooted in her sense of place and reverence of nature, revealing that the hills hold space for honoring loss, for remembering, and for seeing "light in the mourning." In energic words that summon healing and tap into the universal human experience, Dodson makes the personal space a communal one, where grief becomes a sacred, creative act connecting the bereaved to the departed within poetry's "thin place." https://wipfandstock.com/9798385213092/between-gone-and-everlasting/ The Medicine Woods (2022)
The Medicine Woods is a graceful and soul-stirring meditation on how our planet's future lies in the ability to embrace the oneness of life and practice nonviolence toward each other, the trees, the seas, and all beings. In this second collection of awe-inspiring poetry, Danita Dodson uplifts the ecological stewardship that obliges us to seek healing in its many forms--to walk in the woods, to cure waters, to return the soil to its original state of health, to mend broken hearts and minds, to give justice to the oppressed. With perceptive musicality and stunning natural imagery, the poet offers the spirit of what her grandmother sought when she ventured into the East Tennessee woods to find medicinal plants to heal her family--poems that carry an imaginative ethnobotanical essence as they distill curative words in this time of climate change and escalating violence. Uniting the natural and the divine and connecting the hills of Appalachia with the planetary landscape, Dodson's mystical verses exemplify the wisdom of a poet with a love of place, illuminating the deep connection to the land that underlies the desire to love it, to protect it, and to listen to its stories. https://wipfandstock.com/9781666754155/the-medicine-woods/ Trailing the Azimuth (2021)
Trailing the Azimuth guides the readers down various trails through striking imagery, resonant language, and intensity of vision. Linked by allusions to the "azimuth," the poems in this collection represent the search for direction in a world that is complex and uncertain, prompting the journey toward light and more mindfulness of self, others, and God. These lyrical compasses exhibit a multiplicity of style and subject informed by the poet's travels, interest in hiking, and cultural awareness. Her multifaceted handicraft draws energy and empathy from everything in her background. Taking us along on walks within her own native landscape and around the world, Danita Dodson gives us verses about the ancestral identities of an Appalachian homeplace, meditations upon places like the Southwest that unfold Native American storytelling, celebrations of global journeys that rejoice both diversity and oneness, psalms that uplift the divine presence in nature, and poems that reveal healing pathways through COVID-19 by elevating memory, hope, and rebirth. Illuminated by Dodson's unique voice as both a mountain woman and a citizen of the world, Trailing the Azimuth bridges physical and spiritual landscapes, offering readers a word map as they traverse their own paths of life. https://wipfandstock.com/9781666731767/trailing-the-azimuth |
Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of three poetry collections: Trailing the Azimuth (2021), The Medicine Woods (2022), and the recent Between Gone and Everlasting (2024). She is also the co-editor of the pedagogical book Teachers Teaching Nonviolence. Her poems are anchored in the landscape and people of East Tennessee and have appeared in Salvation South, Amethyst Review, Tennessee Voices Anthology, and elsewhere. At the Poetry Society of Tennessee’s annual festival in April 2024, her poem “Bits and Pieces” was awarded the Best of Fest prize. Danita has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. She is a native of Sneedville, Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the wilderness.
Read more at www.danitadodson.com. |