Gathering the Pieces - Softcover

Carol Lem, who lives in Sierra Madre, California and teaches creative writing and literature at East Los Angeles College, is the author of Searchings, Grassroots, Don't Ask Why, The Hermit, The Hermit's Journey: Tarot Poems for Meditation, Moe (Remembrance), SHADOW OF THE PLUM, and GATHERING THE PIECES. A reading of selected poems from SHADOW OF THE PLUM may be heard on her CD, Shadow of the Bamboo, with music by Masakazu Yoshizawa.

The poems in Gathering the Pieces are remarkable for their quiet insight and humility, for their keen attention to and transformation of the small details of a life. Carol Lem s is a true voice in sure command of her craft, and her clear and accessible vision gives us poems that reveal profound and essential understanding. In Shooting Star she says, its brightness disappearing / before my wine glass touched my lips. and so her themes are the transience of our lives and at the same time the beauty of nature that sustains us. The keen attention these poems pay to the world helps to transform and celebrate all of our lives. --Christopher Buckley

There s something wondrous about this collection. In an age that s produced relatively few love poems, each of Carol Lem s seems to rise from love of friends, teachers, the art of teaching, the art of learning, and music, the bamboo flute, the notes, the silence between them, the hush at the end. In fact, I want to say the poems are in love. Would that be corny? Maybe, but the poems are not; they are imbued with a tenderness toward the commonplace and a deep awareness of the mystery that surrounds it, that rests upon the quotidian world. --Suzanne Lummis

Carol Lem s poetry is not what it appears to be. The ordinary things she quietly places before you a bracelet, bamboo flute, and tattered journal and the lost things a plum tree and child on a swing, movie extras and the dearly departed are startled awake, catch their breath, aflame with memory and words. --Robert Lawson