Garment for a Long Journey celebrates the body of work of California poet Lo Verne Brown (1912-2000), whose writing career spanned the late 1920s to the late 1990s.
Poems from three earlier collections of her poetry are included in this volume, along with additional loose poems, some never before published.
Among the themes of the over 200 poems in Garment for a Long Journey are nature, human relationships, politics, social justice issues (especially the homeless, the poor, and the powerless), diversity, humor, and poetry itself.
Brown's poems possess an energy; they are powerful and engaging and each carries a clear message.
If you like the soulfulness of Mary Oliver and Edna St.
Vincent Millay and the wit of Dorothy Parker, you'll enjoy reading Lo Verne Brown.
One critic has described her work as a reflection of life's meaning and our place in it.
She was intuitive and observant and understood the complexities of relationships and the things all humans need to grow and thrive.
The need for love? Brown described it simply in her four-line poem Sustenance: Over and around us move Those nutrients we group as love And each of us with separate sieve Must scoop these plankton in to live.
Brown first won acclaim for her poetry while a teenager at the University of California, Berkeley.
As a student there in the 1930s, she began a lifelong association with a writing group known as the Bay Area Poets.
She won so many awards in the group's annual writing competition that the rules had to be changed to limit the number of entries per person.
In 1932, the anthology California Poets included five poems written by Brown, who at 19 was the youngest poet to be represented in this collection.
By 1935, she was working as a newspaper reporter in Juneau, Alaska, where she had lived as a child and where she met and married a fellow reporter George Brown.
After the couple relocated to California in 1937, she ghost wrote two books--No Life for a Lady, and Consultation Room--both of which w.
| Sustenance | Over and around us move |
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Booklocker.com Garment for a long journey: the collected poems of loverne brown, paperback/jonnie wilson
