booknotes / By Amy Stewart

Celia Homesley’s Crimson Leaves

(Feb. 15, 2007)  Celia Homesley’s first book of poetry, Body of Crimson Leaves, is an absolutely lovely collection of quietly beautiful poems. Most of us don’t buy many books of poetry in a year, but I suggest that you start off 2007 by adding this one to your library. You can also meet Celia at Booklegger this Saturday at 7 pm - she and Jerry Martien will read from their work, and Celia’s bringing homemade cookies. What’s not to like? Here’s what Celia had to say recently about her life as a writer:

Your poetry seems to me to be all about an intersection between the natural world and our personal lives and relationships. Is that right?

I guess the natural world has always been a metaphor, for me, for humans: our bodies and our feelings. So, I’ll smell a particular flower, a narcissus, maybe, and it will smell like a particular fragrance of self, a kind of sweet sadness maybe, or maybe it will look like the face of a girl I knew when I was a girl … it’s not the kind of thing I’ll even think about consciously when I smell the flower, but it will come to me later when I’m writing. Trees are similar. And sometimes animals.

Your poems are very beautiful on the page. Do you think about how they look on the page?

I want my poems on the page to be clear, simple and as elegant as possible. I don’t want their form to hinder anyone from reading or understanding them. If a poem calls for it, I may need to enjamb lines for a sense of urgency, for example, but usually a poem’s pace is slow and methodical enough that I can break lines at the ends of thoughts or images, which lends a simplicity and purity to the form.

Do you do much revision?

I usually revise a poem many times at first, and then little by little over the years, if each time I look at it it doesn’t seem right. There’s definitely a point for me where, eventually, a poem seems right, and then I won’t touch it. If, say, five years after I’ve written it, it still feels right, I won’t mess with it.

Do you like to read your work aloud?

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