Carol created this slide show from family archival photos I sent her. These photos play over my reading of "Mama's Suitcase" from "Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music."

Here's an excerpt from her review:

Although Sightlines is very personal, the reader is not left outside to be a distant observer, peering through a cracked door or listening at the keyhole. The reader recognizes the history, the humanity, the process as if they were her own. The experience is both calming and reassuring. But there’s more. Janet moves beyond the physical and emotional loss to grapple with the meaning of the loss.

Her collection, "diary" as she calls it, is a poetic memoir, a memorial to her family and ancestors. Filled with photos that enhance vs. detract, SIGHTLINES will unearth your own memories and stories.

As a writer, it was hard to read as each poem made me run for paper and pencil to jot down a toggled memory of my own.

The poetry collection "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" by Janet Riehl is a soaring, poignant homage to family, sorrow, and the rebirth that comes with pain and loss. Written after the death of her sister in a tragic automobile accident, Riehl cobbled together her father's mournful poems as well as her own and set out to document the ties that bind and the things that matter most.

Interwoven with collections of family photographs are meditations on the importance of family and the comfort of kin. Using memories and recollections as her foundation, Riehl's poems are heartwrenching and triumphant. Many of the poems read as journal entries, and diary submissions. There's no belletristic prose or coruscate syntax, it's simple, it's original and straight from the heart.

Though the book obviously caters to those who have experienced a similar loss, there is a resounding conviction in her writing that allow her words to enter into the hearts of the reader. Much like Jane Brox's family memoir "A Thousand Days Just Like This One," Riehl retraces family steps while revisiting classic bits of dialogue. An example of this is in "Catechism":

Mother: "Dad Died?
Janet: Yes.
M: When?
J: Maybe forty years ago.
M: Why didn't I know about it?
J: Maybe you forgot.
M: That's possible. What else is possible?
J: I don't know, Mom.
M: Where are they now?
J: Up in heaven, I guess."

Though the book's center is initially Riehl's mourning of her lost sister, it's the pieces about caring for her ailing mother and her recollections of her Midwestern childhood that leave an indelible mark.

One of Riehl's better poems is "Praising Mother":

Your magnolia petal soul bobs down the creek
Navigating shallows and peering into depths
Delicate titmouse feather Mama, same as those
Miniature birds you feed
Before they dart into ground places.

No, Riehl's book isn't a New York Times bestseller and no, it probably won't garner glowing reviews from the folks at Harper's and Kirkus Review, but Riehl's work is both reflective and significant, and those two aspects are enough to earn this book a positive recommendation. More information on Riehl is available at her Web site www.riehlife.com.

Marcy Burns has been a "friend of the book" since Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" came out in 2006. She found it through Dan Poynter's list, reviewed it, and set about becoming a friend of the book, my work, and me. On my trip to Riverside last winter [click here for audio of talk and music], I met Marcy for the first time in her lovely home in Oxnard, California. This morning she sent me this heartening note:

The Ventura UU Book Group begins each session with chalice lighting and an opening reading. Yesterday, just as I was ready to leave home to go to the session, the group leader telephoned to say she couldn’t be there, and she asked if I would be the leader for the day.

Marcy

Dear Janet,

My sweetheart, Nan, and I drove around Clear Lake to take photos of Mount Konocti and buy a copy of your wonderful book "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" at the Lakeport bookstore.

On a whim, we went over the Hopland grade to Lakeport. As we reached the summit, we could see Konocti off in the distance. The top was bathed in morning sunlight, the foothills were dark green, and the base was in shadow---three levels of heaven. The photograph came out great and captured the "supine form” of the Konocti Princess.

View of Konocti from the Hopland Grade by John Frary

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary." It is beautifully written. I clearly identified with the toil and tribulations you underwent and endured in losing your loved ones. I was a caregiver for my wife who passed on six years ago. A warm, loving relationship can endure and be strengthened by difficulties that are not even imaginable in the beginning.

I especially liked ASHES WASHED CLEAN. Your poem reminded me of a crazy experience I had helping my best friend scatter his mother’s ashes over the S.F. Bay. The Neptune Society’s boat broke down before we could leave the harbor, and so we took on the task of finding a suitable place to release her beautiful soul. We carried the urn and walked for hours, beyond the marina and all the way to Fort Point under the Golden Gate, where we finally released her to the outgoing tide.

This is the hour o’ soul,
Thy free flight into the wordless
And there fully forth emerging,
Silent, gazing
Pondering the themes
thou lovest best
---Walt Whitman

Please let me know when you will be in Lakeport again for the signing of, hopefully, a new book? I’ll be there!

In friendship,

John Frary

P.S. In this photo taken from Lakeport, Mt. Konocti has a cuter "nose" and seems to have "pitch poled" to the bottom of her bed in Clear Lake.

John H. Frary's "View of Konocti from Lakeport"

In 2005 on the first birthday after Julia's death in 2004, I wrote in "Reaper":

Sunday, March 13th.
Our flower calendar shouted her name.
One of the only birth dates I know by heart.
Hers. Julia’s. Sometimes it’s hard to say her name,
to sort it all out without coming apart.
Her 62nd birthday and she’s not here to enjoy it.
What a shame!

Strength shot through with a stubborn edge.
Both stood her in good stead.

*** *** ***
Julia traveled the globe as a misisonary of physics. Today I fly to Southern California to give a service on Sunday for the Riverside Unitarian Church, "Memento Mori: Life and Death, Moment by Moment" [read text on sidebar] that includes much of her story and our story. It seems so right that I'm traveling on her 65th birthday. As I said in "Valentine":

She came and went on airplanes and trains.
Spanned continents.
Subatomic explorations, muons and pions accelerated.
Cosmic rays glowed in mine shafts.
Minorities and women in science.
Good works all around.

I'm writing thank you notes, Julia.
This one's for you.

________________

"Reaper" and "Valentine" excerpts both from "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary," by Janet Grace Riehl and copyrighted by the author 2006.

Mother, that which you filled and then emptied,
we fill again as best we can.

Your chair hold us at the wheelhouse hub,
yet a glance windowward unfolds and holds worlds beyond.

This morning's world insulated in a snowy rug.

Cardinal families flit-flash at the new-fangled feeders
Daddy fills in your name.
He bustles in, shakes himself,
like an old dog in a new body:
"I like going out in the cold to feed the birds.
Keeps me in touch with the real world."

Outside the kitchen window
the floor of the wooden feeder rots.
Old John,
the prettiest woodpecker one could hope to find,
dined under its tin roof.

In those times of regular butchering
we filled suet baskets easily.
Now, with everything shipped under plastic
where could you get suet
anymore?

Daddy says persistent squirrels
baned the old feeder in later years.
In came the plastic urns.

In his day, the feeder rested
on the other side of the house.
No squirrels climbed there,
but its harder to commune, too.

Titmice pick at their feed outside the window.
Dressed in neutral mix and match,
they fade into place.

Evergreens bough down under the snow weight.

Below our bluffline, River Road traffic.
Beyond the island, power plant rumblings.

Even snowbound and serene
the world and its noise travels to us.

We do our best mother,
to fill again
that which you filled
and then emptied.

In 1936, when my father was 21, he wrote a song for Sherman Bowen's younger sister, Lucille, that came to be titled "The Girl in the Little Blue Hat." Lucille was sixteen when he composed the song, but had been perhaps eight-years-old when my father started dancing square dances with her at Ben Hill's dances in his garage. Lucille was a bundle of energy and a lot of fun. A few of the grown-up dancers objected to her being so small, but most of them accepted my father and Lucille on the dance floor with a smile.

Eddie Lock and Bee Lewis helped write the song. My father hadn't considered it seriously, just something he'd put together for fun. He says, "Eddie was helping me work one Saturday, and we got to talking about it as we worked. That evening we were playing music over at Lewis' and Eddie said, 'Play that one we were fooling around with today.'" Thus, "The Girl in the Little Blue Hat" was born as a full-fledged tune. The Bee Lewis music group played it for the centennial of the Godfrey Congregational Church later in 1936.

My father used Lucille Bowen as a model for heroines as the characters of Laurel Rusk and Louisa Ray in his novels "The Home Place," and "The Lean Years," respectively.

My father sang with his children as we grew up. "The Girl in the Little Blue Hat" is part of my heritage. It's a fine little comic song. I only wish you could hear the tune.

This Valentine's week I revived the coquette in the Little Blue Hat with two performances at two St. Louis open mics. I performed the song at the St. Louis Writers Guild Wired Coffee Open Mic to an older crowd on Tuesday night. On Thursday, at the Valentine's Day Massacre at the Royale (which turned out to be a bar, not the fine restaurant it looked like in the website photo!), I shared it with a much younger group of college students and 20-and 30-somethings, and to my delight, they responded as well, chiming in on the chorus:

CHORUS

See that girl! See that girl!
The Girl in the Little Blue Hat?
See that girl! See that girl!
As she looks this way and that?
[major retardando on next two lines for comic effect]
Still we sometimes wonder
Just how much is under
Under the little blue hat! [this line then speeds up]

Curiously, both young women who modeled the hat at the Wired and the Royale share the name '"Julie." They both added to the act by hamming it up quite nicely.

VERSES

1
There is a girl you know quite well,
of every ball she is the Belle.
I saw her, and oh boy I fell
for the girl in the little blue hat!

2
Now this girl, I do declare,
really is a lady fair!
Light blue eyes, and curly hair,
and oh that little blue hat!

3
I asked her if she'd ever been kissed?
She said: "Well now, if you insist: [Spoken with a lot of sassiness!]
I'm sweet sixteen, and never been missed,
under my little blue hat!

I sent an excerpt from WINDOW FRAME originally published in "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" and dedicated to my mother Ruth Evelyn Johnston Thompson (January 4, 1916-May 1, 2006). It's a story poem that tells how my mother never lost her essence, even when she lost the full use of her mind...how her passion for watching birds just dove deeper into herself.

My pal Hal Manogue and other fine poets are also featured in the poetry corner.

In addition to the poetry corner (Yvonne's soulful side), you'll find:

* Three Things Necessary to Make Writing Good and Powerful
* NIGHTENGALE NUGGETS: Soup-to-Nuts Publishing Service
* Walk ‘N Roll Dog Touches the Heart of Valentines
* WITS Podcast Schedule February 2008
* THE WRITER’S VOICE
* NETWORK WITH US
* THE WRITING LIFE: Ways to Use Metaphors
* Why You Should Write a Book Proposal (Even if you Plan to Self-Publish)
* FEBRUARY POEMS
* PUBLISHING WITH LULU.COM
* FEBRUARY BOOK REVIEWS
* Write What You Know...If You Dare
* Are You SMART? Making Progress with your Writing

Yvonne says, "Whether you are a published author or a writer-wanna-be you will find articles, announcements, book reviews, poetry, and information about the craft and business of writing, publishing and book marketing written by our readers in this newsletter. Our goal is to connect the writing and publishing community through networking that benefits both."

Yvonne is inclusive and skillful in her work. I've become a huge fan in the year I've known her over the net. Someday soon I hope to trek down to Nashville to meet Yvonne and Hal.