Elaine Magarrell (1928-2014) was born in Clinton, Iowa, and was educated at the University of Iowa and Drake University. She published in Yankee, Passager, Poet Lore and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, Inventory, and two prize-winning books of poetry: Blameless Lives, recipient of the Washington Prize, and On Hogback Mountain, recipient of the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize. Her honors include numerous grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a Fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lived in Washington, D.C.
Her poetry is earthy, sometimes bawdy, the natural world presented without sentimentality, but with imagery so vivid it will take your breath away. Hers was a "leaping" mind-intuitive, free from the constraints of reason, free to fly with apparently little effort. Yet her poems are also infused with plain speech, Zen-like in their purity. -Barbara Goldberg, author of The Royal Baker's Daughter and Kingdom of Speculation Elaine's poems are deceptively simple, but are wise and complex things. She had a unique way of taking the tiny and finding the big, and reducing the big into a tiny detail, the way a heron stands, or the taste of key lime pie. The Madness of Chefs is an apt title. Elaine's poems are full of food: crispy chicken skin, raisin cake, oranges and apples, and of course, her sister's tongue and brother's dry heart. -Catherine Harnett, author of Still Life and Evidence Elaine could not lie. Her intelligence and character were such that she could not engage in the usual diplomatic platitudes and evasions that for most people soothe and lubricate the rough edges of their interactions. She could not lie, but she could leap, and her poems, full of wild humor, imagination, and acute perception, are touched with that higher madness that makes for sublimest sanity. -Jean Nordhaus, author of The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn and Innocence
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