Margaret B. Ingraham, a poet and photographer, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and “grew up” exploring the woods behind her childhood home. She is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry, and of This Holy Alphabet (Paraclete Press), lyric poems adapted from her own translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119. Ingraham is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, a Sam Ragan Prize and numerous residential Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has twice collaborated with composer Gary Davison, most notably to create “Shadow Tides,“ a choral symphony commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and performed on that date in Washington, DC. Ingraham lives in Alexandria, VA.
“If attention is a kind of love, then Margaret B. Ingraham loves
the Shenandoah landscape—the ‘waters/clucking softly on the rocks’
and the ‘pillar of cloud’ above. ‘It is all about light,’ she
writes, and we are lucky indeed to bask in her mind’s light in
these lush, meditative poems.” —Maggie Smith, author of Good
Bones
“There is something of Elizabeth Bishop in this new collection by
Margaret B. Ingraham. Her remarkable eye and close consideration of
landscape reveal a deeper mystery beneath it all. She never
flinches. In her poem “Ordinary Time,” she writes, ‘In this light I
question how to hold/blessings such as these in trembling/hands
[…]’ These poems are full of such blessings—each complicated in its
own delightful way. Exploring this Terrain possesses a rare lived
wisdom and we would do well to listen.” —Michael Shewmaker, author
of Penumbra.
“Margaret Ingraham's poetry is a wake up call... as if to say,
‘Wake up to what is around you!’ She sees so clearly that her poems
make me aware of my own cloudy vision and stir a yearning to see
with a poet's eye.” —Hattie Kauffman, author of Falling into
Place.
“Margaret B. Ingraham knows that sometimes the world gives us no
options; we chose what we must. In seeing and naming this
‘inexorable slide’ she admits grace and shapes beauty, silently
evoking the Isaiah poet. When Ingraham asks such questions
as, ‘was it the wind that taught the wolf/ to howl or did the wolf
give voice to the wind/and could you hear it then…?’ the poetry of
Job, too, seems to alight on the page. Ingraham’s formal
lyricism, love of the pastoral, and overheard conversations stand
in the revered tradition of Robert Frost. She is a poet who knows
‘there…is no synonym for light’ yet still she writes, understanding
that contemporary poets are still makers and holding to the abiding
truth that wisdom might just be found in seeking to name and praise
the light." —Dana Littlepage Smith, author of Women Clothed With
the Sun
“Through its rhymes, meter, and (lightly placed) biblical
framework, Exploring this Terrain means to comfort.
Braiding earnest religious longing into the memories and
observations of an entirely earthly terrain, Ingraham’s poems hold
the lushness and ease of the rural South. But the light they so
often praise has a vaster scope, and “is all about… / the way it
seeks a silhouette,/ the way it can transform / the rough and round
/ to smooth and plain.” This book’s impulse is, above all, a
generous one.” —Taije Silverman, author of Houses Are
Fields
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