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Special to the Star Tribune
For readers reluctant to read poetry because they "just don't get it," three books by poets with Twin Cities ties offer limpid poems that chronicle daily life in accessible language.
"What's Left Is the Singing," by Mary Kay Rummel (Blue Light Press, $15.95)
Rummel's sixth volume takes readers through the author's time in a convent and into her life after she left -- marriage, children and travels. The lure that drew her from the convent was art; she heard a "wind-aroused river" in a recording of Van Cliburn playing Tchaikovsky, and snuck off to read fiction that the Mother Superior forbade. She writes, "Each book, each quote led her / away from the life she was living."
Many of the poems deal with Rummel's travels to Ireland. There she hears the voices of her grandmothers "sometimes in tandem, sometimes circling." While the Ireland poems read explicitly as elegies, an elegiac tone prevails throughout the book. She writes, "I inherit the dead," "What's missing...