Embedded Files
Continuity
This chapbook of poems was published in 2020 by Gyroscope Press. You can find more information on their website. The book is available on Amazon.com. Susanne Skyrm's photograph, "Morning Light" is on the front and back cover. You can see the front cover by accessing the link at the bottom of this page.
My book Continuity took shape during the COVID 19 pandemic during which our planet Earth and our nation have continued to suffer the stresses of climate change and severe disparities of wealth and power. Our very humanity seems at stake, and our survival depends on a deep regard for the life that surrounds us. At this time, more than ever before, I understand my life as part of the great continuum of cultures on this Earth and realize the urgency of living with empathy and respect for my fellow creatures. At the same time that I take comfort in knowing that some of the same life forms existing today have survived for hundreds of millions of years, I realize that many of them are threatened with extinction. Nature’s fragility, resilience and creativity inspire my poems.”--Norma C. Wilson
In her new collection, Continuity Norma Wilson nails it. She quilts and arranges images, sounds, people, food, and places---weaving concrete daily life into quilted beauty while not ignoring tough parts like pipelines destroying water or COVID. This lovely collection brings home the reality that we are all part of one another through generations, like the poem “My Mother, My Daughter.” Her poems sing and dance with drums and jazzy tunes in a mosaic with coyotes, bald eagles, hawks, morels, and moss. So many favorites linger---“Grandma’s Dresses” and “Paper Cranes”---love shines through her world and keeps us going---continuity indeed.--Jennifer Soule, professor emerita, author of poetry collections Hiawatha Asylum, and Postcard Days.
Frog Creek Road
From the Introduction:
Reading Norma Wilson’s poems keeps reminding me of the British novelist E.M. Forster’s epigraph to one of his novels: “only connect.” Norma is a poet who connects with whatever populates her beloved rural environment: anything from people to Monarch butterflies to foxes to deer to skunks to sumac to thistles to meadow roses to cone flowers to turkeys to geese to moths. Like Mary Oliver, she celebrates, with knowledge and with joy, the rawness and beauty of the physical world. Like the ancient Eastern poets, she knows that all things belong, and that all things, and all events, are connected. In “Deadheading,” for instance, gardening is equated with writing poems: “I must not overlook the dead blossoms,/ but prune and prune to release the voice/ inside me, yearning to speak before frost.” The famous Chinese poet Li Bai said in a poem that “the peach blossom follows the moving water,” and in Norma’s “Dakota Flamenco, we see how the throats of “tiny chorus frogs . . . blown up like yellow balloons are singing open/ the plums’ white blossoms.”
Though the natural world gets most of the attention in these poems, it’s not the only subject. In “Walking at Dusk,” the speaker “finds herself in love/with Autumn’s colors,” yet when she returns home she sees “on TV/ a world of people divided and maimed./Tyrants, bloated with all they can consume,/ children starving, hiding and forced/ to flee, parents and children grieving . . . and seasons out of sync.” And she concludes that she “must not be silent, must reach out, /and march with others for the right/of all human beings to walk in peace.”
Well over 200 years ago the British poet William Wordsworth wrote in a now-famous, prescient poem that “Little we see in Nature that is ours,” and that “we are out of tune.” And so by now, in our time, when our fragile planet is under relentless siege, there is nothing more urgent than saving that very planet, without which no living thing could exist. For all this, the poems of Frog Creek Road are in their own way necessary and beautiful reminders.
David Allan Evans, South Dakota Poet Laureate (2001-15)
The poems in Frog Creek Road (Scurfpea Publishing, 2019) follow the seasonal changes from winter through autumn during a thirty-six year period of Norma Wilson's life with her family, friends and the flora and fauna surrounding her home on a prairie bluff in rural Vermillion, South Dakota.
Rivers, Wings & Sky
This collaborative book was released in May 2016 by Scurfpea Publishing. It features eighteen of Norma Wilson's poems paired with eighteen images of glass mosaics by Nancy Losacker. It also includes a narrative of their eight-year collaboration and an introduction by Shirley K. Sneve. The book is available on Amazon and from the authors.
Memory, Echo, Words
An anthology of poetry rooted in land and life, history and hope, these are the strongest poems submitted for the 2014 annual Scurfpea Publishing anthology. Inside you will find poems by: Steve Boint, Craig Challender, Susan Spaeth Cherry, Kevin L. Cole, Matt Dorweiller, David Allan Evans, Jan Evans, Maureen Tolman Flannery, John Grey, Larry D. Griffin, Roberta Haar, Arn Henderson, Constance Hoffman, Brenda K. Johnson, Charles Luden, Rosemary Dunn Moeller, Lindy Obach, Bruce Roseland, Barbara Schmitz, Brad Soule, Jennifer Soule, Christine Stewart-Nuñez, Suzanne Sunshower, Jean Van Alstyne, Nancy Veglahn and Norma C. Wilson. Cover art by Nancy Losacker.
The book was launched with a reading at Black Sheep Coffee House, Sioux Falls, SD, November 8, 2014, at 7 p.m. Norma moderated a reading and discussion of this book at the 2015 South Dakota Book Festival held in Deadwood South Dakota, Sept. 25-27, 2015.
Under the Rainbow: Poems from Mojacar
Inspired by Wilson's July 2002 residency with Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, the poetry in this book juxtaposes memories and dreams of home with her experience in the desert, mountain and seascapes of Andalucia. Some of the poems are influenced by poetry in Federico Garcia Lorca's Divan del Tamarit.
The Nature of Native American Poetry
This book introduces Native American poetry's sources in song and oral tradition. Separate chapters focus on eight Native poets, Carter Revard (Osage), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), Lance Henson (Southern Cheyenne), Roberta Hill (Oneida), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Wendy Rose (Hopi) and Joy Harjo (Creek). The poets' works are discussed chronologically, each within his or her own personal, historical and cultural context. Sherman Alexie and Tiffany Midge are among the younger poets whose work is discussed in the final chapter.
One Room Country School: South Dakota Stories.
Ninety-three South Dakotans from throughout the state contributed stories from their experience for this book that relates through their narratives the story of a century of education. The book published in 1999 was co-edited with Charles Woodard.
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