Gayl Teller's Books

New From Gayl Teller in July 2010
Inside the Embrace


WordTech/Cherry Grove, 2010

Ordering Information:

Order Inside the Embrace from http://www.cherry-grove.com/teller.html

ISBN 9781934999998, 100 pages, $18.00, paper. Mail order please add $5.00 for S&H

Cherry Grove Collections, POB 541106, Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106

Tel: (513) 474 3761  Fax: (513) 474 9034

Web: www.cherry-grove.com  Questions? Email Lori at bookorder@wordtechcommunications.com

 

Praise for Inside the Embrace

Gayl Teller's poems are like "Learning the Facts," showing us both harsh truths and ways we can cope with them. Together, they bring us Inside the Embrace of an important American poet.
                                 --Dr. David Axelrod
                           Suffolk County Poet Laureate, 2007-09                                                                       
 
In Teller's new collection we are offered gritty, inventive and compassionate poems that celebrate private and public worlds. The 9/11 calamity of an attack on the Pentagon is set against Maxine's mandolin whose music sends out herbal scents. The heady joy of a grandchild effervesces in a series of deftly made triads. Sharply focused, loneliness takes the field as the poet eavesdrops on drifting cell phone chatter. Elsewhere, a history of the horse weaves into a rich and intricate narrative. One grows out of breath with admiration for this wise and touching poet whose vibrant language reverberates in memory.
                         --Colette Inez
                            Author of Spinoza Doesn't Come Here Anymore
 
Gayl Teller's poetry shows a real sense of commitment to language and its possibilities within a poem. Her deep humanity is as apparent as her careful craftsmanship. Her work is intelligent, sensitive and open. One comes away with a true feeling of being engaged in her world, her vision and her themes. She conjures up, to quote Dylan Thomas, "the colour of saying" in poems that really add to one's own existence and experience.
                         --Peter Thabit Jones
                            Poet and Editor of The Seventh Quarry, Swansea Poetry Magazine
 
At their best, as in "Silently and Ceaselessly" and "Jasmine," Gayl Teller's passionate, densely layered, and often tender poems register the always difficult, sometimes awkward or comic, and frequently turbulent events that mark our lifelong journey from the airy lightness and innocence of childhood to the darker and heavier world of adult responsibility, disillusionment, and regret. Inside the Embrace is like a fine-tuned seismograph that registers the small changes and large-scale upheavals of the human condition.
                           --Charles Ades Fishman
                              Editor, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust
                              Author, Chopin's Piano, Country of Memory, & other books
 
The poems of Gayl Teller's Inside the Embrace move deftly and briskly through their subject, gathering all aspects of the world into their warm embrace. There's a lot of humor, tinged with knowingness and sometimes sadness, in Gayl Teller's Inside the Embrace. Teller's poems move, in their unobtrusive, quiet fashion, through a broad range of subjects, engaging them with the same wry sensibility.
"Morning" is one such poem:
 
Morning
 
It comes like a call from someone in the past,
some old friend we'd forgotten on a swing
in memory, sweeping us into those striations
of rose and gold, hints of purple pulling us
through some sorrowful vortex, as she pumps,
and we begin to stir up those subtler hues,
little vibrancies we'd learned from her,
and from so many others we'd met along the way,
as we are so much more than our given primaries,
as our people palette can save us our lives,
and just as our small eyes can contain
that vastness of sky, I tell you, it's that beautiful,
this little shift in perspective, to forgive.
 
"This little shift in perspective" is quietly and nicely stated.
                            --Kevin Walzer
                              Poetry Editor, WordTech Communications
                             http://www.kevin-walzer.com/blosxom.cgi/2010/07/12#teller
 
Cover Image: Robert L. Harrison

 

 

At the Intersection of Everything You Have Ever Loved

San Diego Poets Press, 1989

These poems are rich and full, dense with life as it is lived by a daughter, wife, mother, woman, poet. Ranging from her son's pull-over sweater to the structure of the universe, with stops on the way for politics and current events, her vision is broad and deep, informed by compassion for the human condition and salted by irony and wry wit. She is prodigal with language, as if there never could be an end to her treasure-hoard of words, perhaps because she so often distills a Russian-novel's-worth of family love-hate relations into poems of half a dozen pages each...Her diction and rhythms are as varied as her subjects and forms, ranging from the colloquial to the musical, from the narrative to the lyric voice. It is a great pleasure to see Gayl Teller emerge.

                                                                           --Norman Friedman

                                                                              Founding Editor, Spring

 

The poems are always under the poet's control. The clue to the idea of the poems is in the volume's title--especially the word intersection. Things come and go; Teller acknowledges them and directs them.... With their connections and movements, the poems are complex. For Teller, intersections are places of the fullness and meaning of life.

                                                                            --Henry Berry

                                                                               The Small Press Book Review

   

Gayl Teller's stunning collection of 45 powerful poems is on the whole about close relatives, but most reflective of life in a complicated family of rugged individuals.... Much is metaphor, competent, well deserving of reading.... I enthusiastically recommend this book.

                                                                            --M.K. Henderson

                                                                                Hob Nob

 

Each word is just the right word, the shapes are in the right geometrical forms.... The book contains award-winning poems.... With patience the shield drops and the reality punctures.

                                                                               --Sharon Mulak

                                                                                 Woman Library Workers Journal

 

These poems have much to offer the reader.... All of the poems are filled with a crush of images and events. It is a multiplicity the poet uses in the search for a unifying center.... Gayl Teller is working from an unusually clear philosophical point of view which gives her book substance.

                                                                                --Lois Walker

                                                                                   Long Island Poetry Collective Newsletter           

 

Teller's work resists characterization because of her flexibility.... Here is a voice of exploration and wonder, able to find things to write about in a dinner being made or the end of a Jewish life or the structure of the universe. Her portraits of tangled emotional family lives are done with surgical skill, encapsulating all the past interactions between people into just a few lines. Strong and simple works worth reading.

                                                                                --Michael Gunderloy

                                                                                   Factsheet Five

 

Shorehaven

Mellen Poetry Press, 1996

Shorehaven Beach Club was a summer recreational facility, in the Bronx of New York City, from the early fifties through the seventies. Along with her family, friends, and their families, Gayl teller was a member there for twenty-five years, beginning when she was six years old till her son was six years old. She met her husband there when she was only thirteen. In these lyric poems, Shorehaven provides a lasting sense of community and extended family. But it reveals a human haven, full of the ordinary struggles for meaningful relationships and activities while the turbulence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights and women's movements passed with members through the Shorehaven gates. While Shorehaven was being reconstructed into a complex of townhouses under the same name, Gayl Teller began writing about that special spot we each have, that internalized place of ghostly shadows and enduring sunlight we return to again and again, as the very grit of a loved place suffuses through the bloodstream for a lifetime, that place where present and past are simultaneous.

Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Prize, 1997

 

Moving Day

Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 19, 2001

 

One Small Kindness

Plain View Press, 2003

These poems provide entrance to a powerful soul. They carry the impact of the difficult and heighterned task of being fully alive and open.

                                    --Diane Frank

                                       Blue Light Press Publisher;

                                       Author of Blackberries in the Dream House

 

Gayl Teller could not have chosen a more apt title than One Small Kindness for her provocative qnd evocative book. In some of her most characteristic pieces she shows how small acts of compassion can have large reverberations in people's lives. Again and again, she focuses upon the moment when one life reaches out to another, a moment that makes a world of difference.... She adroitly employs concepts and terminology drawn from philosophy and the sciences. " The Biology Lesson," based on an experience in the laboratory, is a riveting poem which readers could not forget even if they wanted to. Packed with memorable characters and events, One Small Kindness is a mind-stretching, sometimes heart-wrenching book which offers us all an education in empathy.

                                        --Dr. Alfred Dorn

                                          World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets

 

Zesty, ebullient, capacious, and even wise, Gayl Teller's poems revel in the palpable details of a vivacious woman's family life, complete with aging parents, a long marriage,, children, uncles, and aunts. Teller aims each of her poems straight at the fully lived moment, which she believes can be achieved despite grim realities--and perhaps because of them. One Small Kindness memorializes those benign moments of love that never make the news, but lay a deep foundation for well being.

                                         --Molly Peacock

                                            Author of Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems

 

With One Small Kindness, Gayl Teller has produced a book of great strength and tenderness, emotion's lyrics that focus on family, marriage, motherhood, the intelligent connections among them--and with life, love, and death. The poems start with local imagery--"the bounty of familiarity,'' as she aptly calls it--and extend from the kitchen and dining table out to the often hurting world, to Kosovo, say, and East Africa, as well as a hospital room where her father struggles inside his languishing body. These elements (both inner and outer) come together in "the humming white noise of wholeness.''  The book is immense with kindness and poetic skill, starting with the wonderful " Ulysses and Child." One Small Kindness is "not about somber light,''as she writes in the opening poem, but ''belief in horizon again.'' I hope readers young and old will find their way to its penetrating sensitivity. When it comes to the human condition as fertilizer for poetry, Ms. Teller is a modern alchemist.

                                         --Michele Cooper

                                            Editor, The Newport Review

                                            Author of Posting the Watch

 

In spite of all contrary evidence:History's ''bloody face," the Nazi death camps, the humiliating suffering of the aged--one's father, mother or sweet uncle Phil, the licensed global madness of war and terrorism, Gayl Teller insists our journey is still best articulated in Martin Buber's hushed prayer: " Time, Space:Crystalizations of God." The volume's title poem, becomes prism, angle of vision through which to read, indeed, take to heart, such a book. With the neighbor in the modest poem carrying his lame, arthritic, aging Yorkshire, we move with the poet, "into deep dark/with what matters." In such "small" but deeply human exchanges of "kindness"--and I recall again and again the poet John Ciardi--we simply engage "the little that all is." Gayl Teller remains for me, then, such a poet, of small things made visible, made sacramental. And her voice, distinct and expansive, that very register to which her music is tuned, is bold and certain enough to encompass music of  the Old Testament psalms, as in "The Bigger Family" ...For in Gayl Teller's poetry, the reader's ear hears what the eye has seen. Her total, unflinching immersion into the things of this world--often that bridge between the terrible and the tender--becomes ours; we return tinctured by life's very pain and joy...And again, in spite of all life's contrary evidence, there is a degree of " deliverance," indeed, transcendence. In        " The Bigger Family ," the volume's most ambitious poem, stitch by humanly poignant stitch, we arrive at a hard-earned epiphany, with "these lover's divining rods/twisting and dipping into each other/feeling for fluidity, Jew into Buddhist, Buddhist /into Jew, black into white, white into black/Russian into Italian..." And then final victory and deliverance, located in the "interlinked fingers seeking to divine that sourceful current,/ of refugees on a long, long journey home." She has found the Way, not unlike the prayer at eventide.

                                          --Vince Clemente

                                             Consulting Editor, The Seventh Quarry;

                                             Author of Sweeter than Vivaldi

 


Toward Forgiveness

an anthology of poems

edited by Gayl Teller, Allbook Books, forthcoming 2010

This project is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts in partnership with the Huntington Arts Council.

 

Anthology Highlights

Lyrical Fiesta:A Poetry Festival in Print (Fine Arts Press, 1985)

Bronx Accent: A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough (Rutgers University Press, 2000)

Harmony (World Congress of Poets for Poetry Research and Recitation, Seoul, Korea & NY, 2004)--Silla Gold Crown World Peace Literature Prize

For Loving Precious Beast (Purple Sage Press, 2006)

Songs of Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul, 2007)

Long Island Sounds:(The North Sea Poetry Scene, 2008, 2009, 2010)

Paumanok:Poetry and Pictures of Long Island (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009)

Toward Forgiveness (Allbook Books, forthcoming 2010)

 

 

Journal Highlights

Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, The Seventh Quarry:Swansea Poetry Magazine (Wales), Phoebe, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, The South Coast Poetry Journal, Spring:The Journal of the EE Cummings Society, Performance Poets Association Literary Review, The Connecticut Writer, Dominion Review, The Newport Review, Hudson Valley Echoes, Long Island Quarterly, Atom Mind, Half Tones to Jubilee, Crone's Nest, Poetry in Performance (Annual Spring Poetry Festival, City College), Caesura, Dog River Review, Phoebus, Pikestaff Forum, Wyoming:The Hub of the Wheel, Asbestos

 

 

 

 


Intellectual Property © 2009 Gayl Teller