While it may seem traditional to share with our Spy readers a special holiday message or image as Talbot County ends one year and begins another, it is our instinctive choice to turn to poetry to celebrate this important passage of time.
In this case, we turn to poet Sue Ellen Thompson and her reading of her poem “Home” to set the tone as family and loved ones return to the Shore for reunions and holiday cheer.
We chose “Home” for the same reasons that National Public Radio’s Garrison Keillor chose this particular poem two years ago for the award-winning program devoted to poetry. It is a poem that creates unforgettable images in the mind’s eye for all who listen and think of their own homes during this season of memories.
The Talbot Spy editors and writers send our best wishes to our readers and those coming to our very special home of Talbot County.
This video is approximately one minute in length. “Home” by Sue Ellen Thompson, from They. © Turning Point Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission and can be purchased here.
Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of five books of poetry, including They (2014), The Wedding Boat (1995), and This Body of Silk (1986). Her two other books, The Leaving: New & Selected Poems (2001) and The Golden Hour (2005), were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Known for her elegant control of form, Thompson’s poetry has been praised for its metaphorical heft and sinuous syntax. Poet B.H. Fairchild praised The Golden Hour for its “elegant, wild, beautifully disciplined quatrains and casually rhymed sonnets.” She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2005).
Thompson has received numerous awards and honors, including the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Maryland Author Award, and two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. She has taught at Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Binghamton University (SUNY), and Central Connecticut State University. She currently works at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and tutors adult poets.
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