Home » Community » December Ruth Group
  • December Ruth Group

    Poetry Night
    December 10, 2017, 7-9 PM

    Susan Sawyer’s home, 15 Sheffield West, Winchester

    Bring a favorite poem or two to share with the group – it can be your own composition, an old time favorite, a new discovery, or a short piece of prose.  Here are some suggestions if you need a place to get started:

    • Explore this year’s Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Life on Mars, Duende, or The Body’s Question.
    • Our own Teresa Cader’s work, History of Hurricanes or The Paper Wasp
    • Popular poets at past Ruth Group gatherings: Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, the Psalms

    This year’s Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry, including:

    1. Life on Mars (2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;

    New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose “lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

     

    2. Duende, (2007) winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award and the 2008 Essence Literary Award;

    Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith’s bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.

    3. The Body’s Question: Poems (2003) Debut collection from Tracy K. Smith

    “How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith’s debut collection. Smith’s work is deceptively plain-spoken, but these are poems that are powerfully wrought, inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body’s Question announces a remarkable new voice, brilliantly bundled, ingeniously belted down.” ―Lucie Brock-Broido

    Curious About Ruth Group?

    All women of the church and community are welcome to attend this monthly book group. The group is named after the biblical Book of Ruth – a story of women supporting each other.  Ruth tells her mother-in-law, Naomi, “…Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay”. We go places with each other – through the books we read and discuss together and through the life experiences we share. We choose a variety of fiction and non-fiction books that we hope will encourage the expression of our own thoughts, deepen our bonds of friendship, stimulate our thinking, and provide us with different perspectives. Book Ends usually offers a discount on book groups’ selections. Learn more…

    Next Month: January 21. Read either: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance OR Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. We’ll discuss both. Plus optional HBR article: “What So Many People Don’t Get About the Working Class”, By Joan C. Williams.

    Questions? Want to car pool? Contact Anne Hoenicke or Kaye Nash.