Revered Poet's Final Collection
Reveals Her Light and Dark Sides
"Still Waters is a remarkable collection, deeply intelligent, often witty, always wise, a rare treasure." --Mary Jane Moffat, author of The Times of Our Lives
Poet Thelma Shaw was born in 1901 and was raised in Chicago. She worked in publishing, both as an editor and a free-lance writer. She spent her later years in Northern California, where she was a creative writing teacher at Palo Alto Adult School. She was the founder and editor/publisher of Ponce Press, a small literary publishing company. She lived nearly a hundred years, and those years were filled with the wonder of words.
Even at the age of ninety-nine, when she could no longer see, Thelma Shaw was still writing, still celebrating the way words work and play. She also decided at that time to collect the best poems of her later years into a final volume. The poems she selected for her collection, appropriately named Still Waters, reveal a complex and fascinating woman who understood both disappointment and joy.
Another appropriate title for this book might have been Light and Dark. Many of the poems are happy, almost frothy, and crackling with humor. They laugh at words, they laugh at modern customs, they laugh especially hard at Thelma herself.
On the other hand, Thelma Shaw was not afraid of the dark. She was in fact used to the dark, having lived for years with diminishing sight. She knew full well that her journey was nearly over, and she approached the end with some resentment but also some relief. These poems face the unstoppable process of aging and dying intelligently and courageously.
Thelma Shaw devoted her life to the English language, but she also appears to have spoken fluent feline. Her enjoyment of cats is evident throughout this book; it is an enjoyment full of respect and admiration, as well as droll humor. And even in cats, she notes the presence of light and dark.
Thelma Shaw died on Thanksgiving Day, 2000, two months before her one-hundredth birthday. She left behind a multitude of friends and grateful students, bequeathing her wisdom and her voice in the form of a handsome bundle of poems to be read and reread by those of us still here. |
