Book Cover art shared by Louise Bourne and for more information go to louisebourne.com
True Affections
Poems from a Small Town
In True Affections: Poems from a Small Town (2012), Elizabeth Garber’s long awaited third collection of poems continues her exploration of a life well-lived in Maine. She begins with an epigraph from W.S. Merwin: One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. This signals to her readers that these poems delve into the precarious nature of our time and how necessary it is, to love who and what we love, fearlessly.
Garber’s poems are grounded in distinctive Maine moments: the Spring return of the bobolinks, a deer swimming to an island in January, a ferry ride home from an island. She captures a variety of voices: a tow truck driver, a mayor, and her mother dictating her obituary. In Garber’s island poems, she gazes into the essence of an old spruce and sea urchin shells, and falls under the spell of milkweed in bloom. She takes us to a village in Ohio, from childhood to first love, and continues the story decades later. She ends with a journey Down East to visit a dying friend. Some of her poems dare to lead us into discomforts we try to forget. Yet venturing into suffering and uncertainty, these poems lift us, helping us find solace for our own lives.
Praise for True Affections: Poems from a Small Town
“Elizabeth Garber’s poetry is informed by a human warmth and emotional honesty which make her book hard for any reader to put down. In her lovely, lively poems we experience a fresh, honest, and beautiful response to life that is also strengthening. These are the richly-lived moments of an open heart, presented with skill and compassion.”
—Kate Barnes, Maine’s first Poet Laureate
EXCERPT
The Tow Truck Driver’s Story
You meet all kinds of people in this work.
You have to be polite, twenty-four hours
a day. It was a brutal winter night,
I’d worked since four a.m., finally coming in
to sleep when the phone rang, a guy calling
from up on Appleton Ridge, saying
he needs a jump. I asked, “Can’t it wait?
There’s still snow on the roads, the plows aren’t
all through. It’ll take me three hours at least
to get there with the roads like this.” “Ok,”
he said, “I’ll wait.” I went to bed an hour,
before he called, “It’s an emergency.”
The storm had eased as I headed out,
but the wind had been so bad, I had
to stop and climb over the drifts to knock
the snow off signs to see where to go,
a hard dark climb up to Appleton Ridge.
Over three hours to get to a lonely
country farmhouse, light glowing brightly.
Then a man in, I kid you not, a red
satin smoking jacket comes out and waves.
I think he’s waving to me, and wave back,
but it’s a garage opener and out of the dark
a door rises, lit like a museum,
a car, glittering white and chrome beauty,
it was a 1954 Mercedes.
A Gull-Wing. You ever heard of them?
I think they only made ten of them.
Its doors lift up like a gull in flight.
I bet it was worth a million dollars.
I ask, “Are you going to take that out?”
“Oh, no, we just got back from Jamaica
I want a jump to make sure it’s ok.”
It starts like a dream, purrs dangerously.
“Oh good,” he says and walks away, waving
his arm to close the door, never saying
a word. Left me standing there in the snow.