sheila packa

poetry

cloud birds (2011)

Cloud Birds is a breathtaking flight through the western shoreline of Lake Superior north to the Iron Range of Minnesota. The poems are about bears, immigrants, bird migration, and women moving through violence.

Chosen

I came home
to hear the great grey owl
call into the early dark
beyond the clearing
over the growl and screech
of an animal sheltered
by fallen tree
burrowed out of reach
of talons and beak
below the black tangle
and pine spears
above crystalline snow
and moonlit drift
a merciless hide and seek
followed by inscrutable silence
near and far the lift
of dark wings
into the old ash and gleam of star
or flame with no in- or exhalation
where wind hauls its ice
and diamonds sift
into the blue night.

"The meditations and assembled memories in Cloud Birds dissolve layer after layer of the defenses we erect against eternal human fears and longings. Images from the North, from the Iron Range--bears and birches, roads that had 'no end, only yearning,' set the poems in place and motion. Often the poems do not end in a period: instead they leave us following their trail, "a thoroughfare of light falling through the pines." --Connie Wanek, author of On Speaking Terms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

"Cloud Birds is about bears, wings, migrations--and apples, anger, rivers, roots, coffee, fields, longing and always, always love. The collection is wonderfully liminal. It is richly shaded and shadowed, a translucent layering of meaning and memory, of dream and thistle. It moves between narrative and music, between aura and the most grounded reality. Many of the poems linger as sound as much as image. Some are ephemeral. Some are achingly immediate. The poems invite the reader to become part of the process. Trust the free fall of Sheila Packa's voice and imagination. This is the mystery and power of her work." --Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD, co-editor of Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press, 2009)

Midwest Book Review writes: The changing of seasons, the changing of life seems to move so much faster in the north. Cloud Birds is a collection of poetry from Shelia Packa, a Finnish American woman who calls Minnesota home, viewing the changing of nature and life as she sees it and always moving. Cloud Birds is an excellent compilation of poetry driven by both humanity and the beauty and uncertainty of nature. Cloud Birds: "we live on both sides of the border/in two countries/in and outside each other/bone and blood/in disguise without intention or force/without blandishments/blown by wind/silent like shadow crossing and crossing/over the boundaries without end/borne by moon or sun/burnished by wing."

Garrison Keillor read the poem "Not Forgotten," from Cloud Birds, on Writer's Almanac:
Featured here: writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/05/18

Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 9780984377725
Distributor: Ingram
$15

For more information about the book, see Sheila's blog

To purchase Cloud Birds online see: amazon.com

cover painting by cecilia ramon

echo & lightning: expanded version (2010)

Wildwood River announces the publication of Echo & Lightning (expanded version), a book of poems, by Sheila Packa. It's a love story as well as a story about migration and change. Sheila has had her work featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and anthologized in To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets (New Rivers Press) and Beloved of the Earth (Holy Cow Press).

Kirsten Dierking (author of One Red Eye and Northern Oracle) writes: "So many poems in Echo & Lightning reveal what has to be given away in order to be filled with something greater--a more intense spiritual awareness, a fuller connection with the landscape, a more generous and all-encompassing love. Echo & Lighting transforms us into something freer, wilder, more given to loving, while reminding us that to fly is to risk leaving the old behind ... "

Ellie Schoenfeld, author of The Dark Honey, writes: "These poems are the story of following one's own instincts to, in one way or another, migrate. They bring us to the exact moment when we surrender to our truest selves, when we allow ourselves to be transported, transformed, resurrected."

The Northeast Minnesota Book Award reading team, May 2011 writes: "Lyrical, intimate, all while challenging your personal status quo or inertia. These poems by Sheila Packa evoke all the senses to come to attention - so you don't miss a single, heightened note. Written to be read to the voice of the cello, the experience of reading them to yourself is like swimming in very deep water (at night!)- exciting while pushing you beyond your present limits to LIVE more fully than you ever thought you might!"

Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 9780984377718
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Echo & Lightning online see: amazon.com

cover painting by cecilia ramon

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the mother tongue: sheila packa (2007)

$18.95 (includes shipping)

loom

sheila packa

	
	When I was a girl, my mother 
	tore suits and dresses into strips
	and wound them up into balls. 
	Wool and cotton, silks and satins, 
	dark rainbows that couldn't be clouded
	by the dust that rose in that destruction,
	geological hues tied with a zeal,
	the cat chased those tails endlessly.
	When all this was done,
	my mother descended with her baskets
	to the loom in the basement,
	that big creaking frame
	threaded with string sunsets and 
	daybreak brilliance, with foot pedals
	bigger than a piano's and rhythms
	that were like shifts in the heart
	or quakes underground.
	She threw the shuttle and pounded the bar
	against the rags of the past
	so rugs came reeling out, 
	all warp and weft and her breathless.
	Even now I feel her rhythms
	in the everyday disasters,
	feel the need to tear my clothes, get down
	to the most basic elements.
	I want to - somehow in the heartbeat
	of the dark and in the lap of great effort - 
	take the threads of the past
	and bring up something new.

published by calyx press

Anyone who has ever visited Northern Minnesota can identify with the expert metaphors and beautiful repetition of sounds of The Mother Tongue. The collection is divided into three sections, The Mother Tongue--narrative poems about her youth; Torrent--erotic love poems clearly influenced by the poet's past and homeland; and Fluency--narrative poems about finding love, both romantic and platonic. Describing herself as a "daughter of love," Sheila Packa transcribes her experiences coming of age and finding love in Minnesota's rural mining community. Packa sees herself as part of her surroundings toiling deep in the heart of an iron mine, professing her love to her Iron Range boyfriend, taking a dip in the rust-colored "Wine Lake." And yet, struggles with her Finnish heritage give her poetry the emotional distance needed for a foreign reader. As she comes to understand the cultural differences which create a barrier between her and her mother, she writes, "We must go to make new/ love and let the past go." At the same time, her poetry celebrates the past, her heritage, and the North, which provides "the iron in our veins." Packa has received two Arrowhead Regional Arts Council fellowships for poetry and two Loft McKnight Awards. -Elizabeth Bance
Minnesota Literature Newsletter

The Fiction/Poetry/Drama reading group loved this beautiful collection of poems. This 3-part collection includes 28 erotic poems, which sweep the reader up by surprise, interspersed with Packa's reflections about growing up as the daughter of a Finnish mother while living in the economically stressed region of the Iron Range. While these are personal explorations of identity and mother/daughter relationships, the reader travels along easily and willingly for the bumpy ride.
- Reading committee for the Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards (2008 Honorable Mention for The Mother Tongue)

cd (poetry & cello) - undertow (2010)

$8 (includes shipping)

kathy is a fiscal year 2010 recipient of an artist support grant from the arrowhead regional arts council (www.aracouncil.org) which is made possible through an appropriation from the mcknight foundation. the funds from this grant were used to purchase the equipment used to record, mix, and master this work.

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