Never the Loss of Wings
Poetry | Soft cover | 74 pages
“These poems are a celebration of our immortal ‘wings’ even as we face our own mortality. Now in my 8th decade, I am experiencing the diminishments of my body more intensely and immediately than I had been able to imagine. I know I am not alone in this. Yet simultaneously the gift of life is more accessible than ever.”
Maryhelen Snyder
In her later years, Maryhelen Snyder was a retired psychotherapist with ongoing involvement with the profession. She also had a long history of teaching, having taught preschool through post-graduate level. She has been published in numerous journals, and has four books in addition to Never the Loss of Wings: Sun in an Empty Room (2012), No Hole in the Flame (2008), Because I Praise (1998), and Enough (1979). Other circles of meaningful connection during her life included her co-housing community in Vienna, Virginia, her Langley Hill Friends Meeting, fellow poets with whom she continued to meet and share work, and an ever-branching family of four children and ten grandchildren.
“I think this book contains poems on the theme of aging, as fine as any that I know. The fact is that ours is a generation living beyond the usual markers and therefore, with faculties more or less intact and a lifetime of skills still available, we are capable of exploring what is in fact the largely unexplored territory of late life. There are many poems in this book that are so lucid and alive as to give the lie to any notion that aging must reduce a poet’s acumen. That acumen is first and last a matter of the perceiving heart, and in their vivid, precise, musical perceptiveness—their immense generosity of spirit and candor—Snyder’s poems bring vividly, convincingly alive the marvels of her ordinary/extraordinary living. Her poems affirm my intention to keep going in the direction from which they spring. A poem that gives courage as well as pleasure is a rare, cherished gift.”
Peter Pitzele; author, Our Father’s Wells
Snyder discusses writing, aging, her poetry, and the soul. From “Of Some Renown,” a video series. Recorded on July 2017. Watch on YouTube.
“And even if he is your grandson
and twenty-eight. and you, eighty two,
and he six feet two, and you
five one and shrinking, your head now
at the height of his steady heart.
And even if he insists, and not only
because you are crippled and each hand
holds a cane, that you lean back to where
you can hear that firm thump thump
and feel his cool sweat as he waltzes you
like a pendulum swinging from star to star.
And even if you sense you are trembling,
as though you were thirteen—or two—
and newborn each time
to this male and female world—
and you resist leaning even as you lean—
please, for God’s sake, love—
this moment.”
—from “Waltzing with Stephen at Jessica’s Wedding”
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