INTRODUCTION

              The poems in At the Confluence were written between Linda Allardt’s eighty-sixth and ninety-third years. Increasingly confined to views of her backyard, she observes the changing of trees, birds, weather and light while also looking back at a life and unflinchingly toward death. In “Late November,” the poet in wonderment asks of herself and the leaves “what handclasp holds us here.” 

Allardt is keenly alive to the natural world, her dear and life-long subject, and to a sense of a world beyond what can be seen. In “River Song” she is not simply describing the sound of a river flowing or a “skipping stone” dropped into it, but something we know “in blood and bone/as the variable music of being.”

Her exquisite ear, precise eye and astute insight, hallmarks of her decades of writing, are all at play here, although these poems are starker; they are meditations on a life long lived. Linda might have said this is what the aging mind can hold.

Language is not limited to the spoken and written word. The shadows cast by tree branches on a page she is reading (“Shadow”) “form a language,/older than Sanskrit” and become part of the text she is reading; she is “ensorcelled” by the confluence of the two.

              There are surprises. In the tender but unsentimental lyric “Remember, Too,” a long ago love affair is reconstructed almost entirely in poignant questions posed to her lover as if seeking confirmation that their love was real.

              Thanks are due to all who made this chapbook real. To Linda, first, of course, for her poetry.  To her family, her daughter Meg Post, and to her son and daughter-in-law, Rob and Gail Gallasch, who entrusted me with her poems. Poets Wanda Schubmehl and Patricia Hooper, who knew well and loved her poetry, brought their extraordinary ears and eyes to the project. Together we gave it the title. Thank you. Finally, we are grateful to FootHills Publishing for giving Linda’s final poems a second life and thereby making them available to a larger audience. My hope is that the book will inspire readers to return to Linda’s earlier books or read them for the first time, poetry which I believe has not received the acclaim it so richly deserves.

Kathleen A. Wakefield

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