Love chooses the people and things we name first. In these poems, Trina Gaynon attempts the more difficult task of seeking names for the new and unexplored. In the process she claims the roles of first-time home buyer, resident in the troubled town of Richmond, second language tutor, writer, and church member before she comes to love them. She attempts to make “The Bay Area” an honest answer to the question, “Where are you from?”
The poems in Quince, Rose, Grace of God are gentle, probing ruminations on the lifelong search for companionship, comfort, and meaning. They are often contemplative, as in “Wakeful on Thirty-third Street,” where a pair of strangers cross paths while walking in the rain before dawn. Water is omnipresent in its many forms-even juxtaposing the danger and potency of the Pacific Ocean with the still tedium of dishwater, in “Submerged,” where a lifelong fear ends in at least the possibility of redemption. Toward the end of the collection, the sense of loss that serves as a low undercurrent throughout is crystallized in “Federal Building Bombed,” where a rescue worker is ultimately brought to tears by a cup of coffee, faced with “the only grief/ I could put my/ hands around.” Ultimately, though, the prevailing feeling is one of hope.
–Leah Browning, editor of the Apple Valley Review
Quince, Rose, Grace of God is a fabulous collection of poetry. It is an audacious and evocative work drawing upon a strong sense of life and humanity. Quince, Rose, Grace of God is clever as well. Trina Gaynon skillfully employs the use of metaphor to create vivid imagery of horticulture, ecology, and humanity. One cannot help but imagine having not only a visceral experience with her poems but a deeply emotional one as well. “Invocation Dusk”brilliantly, with its powerful sense of compassion, establishes the emotional context for Quince, Rose, Grace of God as it invites the reader to consider what is to follow on subsequent pages. Poem after poem, Trina Gaynon weaves various narratives between the imaginative and the empirical, between the concrete and the abstract, between what readers know to be the human experience. This poet would be remiss by not saying bravo to Trina Gaynon and Quince, Rose, Grace of God.
–Emmett Wheatfall, poet, Our Scarlet Blue Wounds
Trina Gaynon’s collection, Quince, Rose, Grace of God, explores the human puzzle of learning to live in this world and what to do with its often-contradictory lessons. Her invocation, “Remember to stake the peonies/ bury iris bulbs in October/ hold the world in your poetry/ make it sacred,” advises that life is both practical and spiritual. It is a world of beauty-pink flowers and western sunsets-but also one in which fishermen husbands may not return, and even opening one’s door in the morning could reveal things we don’t want to see. The book is not rooted in one place but reflects the author’s travels and relocations-New England, Tennessee, the ruins of the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, San Francisco, South Carolina, a lobster-fishing coast, O’Keeffe’s New Mexico-an American kind of wandering. Yet even for a lost fisherman, we can imagine, “There are enough hard-boiled detective books below to tide him over.” In any case, we are on our own, and we make what we can of it all. “Heading west, where God lives, I glow, sheltering the flame of the holy, burning most brightly alone on the road.”
–Barbara Drake,author of What We Say to Strangers and The Road to Lilac Hill
Trina Gaynon
spent forty years in California, where she claimed her poetic voice. She later moved to a suburb dropped on top of a marsh near Portland, Oregon, which she shares with her husband, a wealth of birds, an occasional snake, and a growing population of beavers. She leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute. Her work appears in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, other anthologies, and numerous journals. Her chapbook, An Alphabet of Romance, is available from Finishing Line Press.