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Archive for April, 2023

Two New Podcasts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on April 21, 2023| Leave a Comment »

How to Embrace Life’s Paradoxes with Eric Zimmer: On The One You Feed

How do we trust life when even the worst things come true? That’s one of many threads I follow with Eric Zimmer on his fabulous podcast The One You Feed–an hour of exploring how to meet what scares us, embrace the unknown, curiosity and openness. Listen here on his website or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

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Finding Your Voice in the Void with Laura Tohe: on Emerging Form

In honor of National Poetry Month, Christie Aschwanden and I were lucky enough to speak with Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Laura Tohe about her experiences growing up without access to books written by Natives or about themes that resonated with her–and how she eventually found a community of writers who encouraged and supported her to write her stories. Listen here on our Emerging Form website or anywhere you listen to podcasts. 

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Walking to the Grave

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 20, 2023| 8 Comments »




Now, when I walk
through the cemetery,
I say aloud the names
of the dead as I pass.
Elma. Clara. Brooke. Millie.
Now I know the gift
of saying the name,
how the syllables invite
an honoring of the life.
Rose. Charles. Harry.
There is one gray stone
that simply says brother.
Brother, I say as I pass.
By the time I reach
the marker for my son,
the air is alive with names.
Finn, I say, as I kneel
in the dirt. Finn.
Sometimes, when I pray,
it’s the only word
I know how to say.


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The Sleekest Grief

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 19, 2023| 6 Comments »

I stared through the glass
at the turquoise and low slung
Nio EP9—a battery-powered
two-seat sports car. Zero to sixty
in two point seven seconds.
Separate motor and transmission
for every wheel. Advance
torque vector system,
whatever that means.
But I knew you would know.
Though I care nothing for chassis
and Vmax speeds, I stared at that car
like a boy dreaming of Christmas morning,
like a mother dreaming of a boy
who still can dream,
stared until its aero-efficient lines
blurred and swam, my heart
revving silent in my chest.

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Of Tenderness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 19, 2023| 7 Comments »


 
 
So easily the thin rind
pulls away from the Clementine
to reveal what is soft,
what is sweet.
 
It matters, I think,
the way we offer
ourselves to each other.
 
I think of how it falls open,
the peel of the ripe clementine.
 
I think of how sometimes,
when I ask how you are,
you, too, fall open
and give me everything.
 
What a gift
when I don’t need to pry.
What a gift, the bright scent
of conversation,
how the tang of it
lingers in the air.
 
I long to open
for you this way, too.
Trust begins here.
 

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A Shimmer of Poems

Posted in Uncategorized on April 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »

While I was away in the early April chill of the Baltic region, I was lucky enough to have a lot of poems come out in various fabulous venues–and I’d love to share them with you–the poems & THE AMAZING VENUES … I highly recommend hanging out in ONE ART, Vox Populi, Grateful Living and Turning Towards Life. They are all amazing purveyors of poetry (and much more!)

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Traveling to Scandinavia in Spring

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 17, 2023| 3 Comments »


 
After the long winter,
we choose to travel north,
choose to move deeper into winter
to wander fjords and cobblestones.
We choose again the gray,
the ice, the snow, the cold.
Now I know there is something freeing
about choosing to explore
what isn’t easy.
There’s release, somehow,
in being on the path less warm
when it’s a path
I feel I’ve selected.
So I don again the coat,
the hat, the down.
I wander the streets
with their chill winds
and think, I want to be here.
And it’s true.
There is joy then,
in the bite, though some days
it goes deep.
Joy in being so present
in winter I forget
I could choose something else.

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All the Honey Launch April 18

Posted in Uncategorized on April 16, 2023| 6 Comments »


I am so excited! Please join me for an online book launch for my new collection, All the Honey, on Tuesday, April 18 at 11 mountain time. It’s a book that reaches at the same time toward loss and laughter, toward despair and delight. There’s more information about the book at this link (where you can also register). 

http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07ejpazn3w202d3ba4&llr=q9rr4nabb

It’s free. I’ll read for about 35-40 minutes and there will be a brief conversation with my beloved friend and artistic collaborator (and the generous host of this program!) Kayleen Asbo. We will converse about how creativity calls us into deeper relationship with all that is.

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To hear more about the book & how it came to be, listen to this most recent podcast of Emerging Form where Christie Aschwanden and I talk about its genesis and execution and the origins for some of the poems in specific. 

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To read a review of All the Honey (that came out two weeks ago in Panorama thanks to Steven Law!) visit here. 
To pre-order All the Honey you can buy it on Bookshop.org or Amazon or your local bookseller. After May 1, you can order from Telluride Bookstore, and from May 1-June 1, I will be able to go into the store and sign copies. (But they are closed for orders from now until May 1–it’s a ski-town thing.) I will send a link out again when they re-open. 

 

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Big Bouquet of Baltic & Scandic Poems

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 16, 2023| 16 Comments »

Dear Friends, 

I’m back from two weeks in Estonia, Finland & Norway where my husband and daughter and I stayed in a medieval village (in Tallinn) and spoke with shopkeepers who remember the Singing Revolution of the 1990s when Tallinn became an independent country again … and then in Finland with my host sister and her family (I was an exchange student for a year in Espoo in the late 1980s) … and then in the fjords of Norway. it was such a wonderful rich time. Every day I wrote a short poem and here is a large bouquet of 17 of them–and now we will return to our regular routine of me sending daily poems! 

In the meantime, so much happened–I have podcasts and poems and videos and so much to share with you! BUT MOST IMPORTANT!!! In two days, on Tuesday, my new book, All the Honey launches, and I hope you will join me and my beloved friend Kayleen Asbo for the lunch launch, 11 a.m. mountain time, Tuesday, online. There is much more about All the Honey, plus the link to the lunch launch in this email just below the big bouquet of poems. Please scroll all the way to the bottom for lots of goodies! 

with love, 
Rosemerry

Baltic and Scandic Bouquet
            poems from Tallinn, Estonia; Espoo & Helsinki, Finland; and Tau & Oslo, Norway



beside the eight-hundred-year-old wall
this yellow crocus
hours old

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slipping into
the stone fortress windows—
thick scent of spring

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medieval cobblestone streets—
how many dreams
fell through these cracks?

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in the fuchsia voice
of the old shopkeeper
memories of gray

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in the bay
the sea moans beneath melting ice—
perhaps forgiveness sounds like this

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inside me
scent of cardamom and coffee—
our conversation delicious


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swimming in the ice
with my sister—
our hearts impossibly warm

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beneath these umbrellas
walk thousands of life stories
I’ll never know

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stranger in this beauty—
every step a chance
to risk opening the heart

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in the ancient church
saying the prayers
only silence can speak

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every day it’s new
this ache
of missing you

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after the hike
is over
enjoying it

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gray spring day
all the leaves still dreaming of green
this bush an insurgence of pink

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and if tonight
it hurts to be alive—
then be alive, heart, be alive

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full moon
above the fjord—
even loneliness falls in love

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calling card
of some unseen angel—
this white feather on my sleeve

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letting it scour me
this ferocious wind—
becoming the white space of a poem

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Thank You Letter (Poem) to Spring Published on Gratefulness.org

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on April 1, 2023| 4 Comments »

What a joy to find that the wonderful Gratefulness.org published a poem of mine that thrills in Spring …  “In Case I Forget to Say It Enough.” The world really does, as Mary Oliver says, “offer itself to our attention” … and this poem celebrates some of the beauty and wonder that spring brings.

In Case I Forget to Say It Enough

Thank you for this day made
of wind and rain and sun and the scent
of old-fashioned lilacs. Thank you

for the pond and the slippery tadpole
and the wild iris that opened beside the pond
last week, so pale, so nearly purple,

their stems already flagged and bent.
Thank you for the yellow morels hiding in the field grass,
the ones we can only see when we are already

on our knees. And thank you for the humming
that rises out of the morning as if mornings
are simply reasons to hum. What a gift,

this being alive, this chance to encounter the world.
What a gift, this being a witness to spring—
spring in everything. Spring in the way

that we greet each other. Spring in the way the golden eagle
takes to the thermals and spirals up to where
we can barely see the great span of its wings.

Spring in the words we have known
since our births. Like glory. Like celebrate.

Published in Gratefulness.org on April 1, 2023

Image by Valeri Terziyski/Unsplash

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Review for ALL THE HONEY in Panorama Journal

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on April 1, 2023| 8 Comments »

I am so grateful to poet and storyteller Steven Law for the thoughtful review of my new poetry collection All the Honey; what a joy to read this response to a book that is open to devastating grief and great joy and pleasure. 

Here’s an excerpt:

One of Trommer’s greatest gifts is her willingness and capacity to inhabit a selected space – whether it’s a car ride with her daughter or slipping through broken slats of a fence to sit alone in an abandoned field – and gather from it everything that is beautiful and noteworthy. An environment, a situation, a moment, an emotion, Trommer gives that space her full attention. Sometimes her attentiveness is that of a camera with its aperture set to f/64, bringing everything near and far simultaneously into focus. Sometimes she uses a poetic macro lens to zoom in on a moment’s smallest, finest details.

To read the whole review, visit Panorama Journal.  (Issue 8)

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