Ivory Hollyhock
Dreama would like to thank her daughter, Laura Frisk, for the cover design and book layout.
This is a poetry and essay collection with an Appalachian focus, a slice of West Virginian history covering the time between World War II and the present. The effects of strip mining on the mountain culture is an underlying theme. The importance of family in the Southern working classes is the subject of many poems.
“These poems describe the opening and closing of flowers, the opening and closing of lives; they breathe. Dreama’s poems are hospitable. They open the door and speak to each other, as the curled toes of the amaryllis speak to the curled body of her mother. They offer to let us in to hear what we have to say. And we might have quite a lot to say to these poems.”
“This poet peeps over the edge of eternity. Her brief poetic flights irradiate and illuminate our lives with spikes of light. She chants hymns to mountain gloom and mountain glory~ hymns to the children of earth at play in Appalachian wind-falls of light. A fine mist of nature flows here with the spring-time freshness of medieval lyrics, a glory from the earth. She is our elegist for the lost world of Appalachia.”