I started writing poetry when my two young sons were old enough, either in school or still taking a nap, to give me a few moments of uninterrupted time. My earlier poems look at the immigrant experience, the search for a place to call home. Later, as my roots found nourishment in Californian soil, the sense of connectedness among all living things has informed my work.
Poems come to me as jolts, not yet articulated into words, more a tingling in the mind, a sense that whatever jolted me is important, and must be shaped into words as meaningful as I can make them.
IN-PRINT BOOKS of POETRY
DAUGHTER
Forthcoming in May 2024 from Finishing Line Press. Pre-publication orders are being taken at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/.../daughter-by.../.
“Maureen Eppstein’s Daughter is an elegy, a cradle-song, and a manifesto for the young woman she was and stillborn daughter she birthed amid the casual misogyny and medical carelessness of the times. Long held as a painful, shameful secret, these poems are an act of release and healing, a descent into the underworld, and a rebirth into air. It will give solace and companionship to the myriad women who have suffered similar losses and never spoken of them, and remain as a testament of a mother’s love.”
–Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of Great Fires
”From the opening lines of Hearts and Flowers through last sestina, Remnant, Maureen Eppstein wraps us in an elegiac language both lyrical and haunting, and with a masterful hand she leads us to experience first-hand loss, anger, grief, and finally the joy of healing. We emerge from this stunning journey with a new appreciation for the world that can only come from the crevices of pain felt deeply by a mother who has lost a child. In the final pages she confesses to a shared sisterhood, When finally I named her, I learned to mourn, and her victory is our shared triumph when she declares I am the valley and mountain, the world and stardust from whence it came.”
–Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios, author of A Concerto for an Empty Frame
HORIZON LINE
“With keen eyes on the horizons of memory, Maureen Eppstein brings us the essentials of ‘music at the daylight’s edge,’” says Sonoma County Poet Laureate Maya Khosla of this poetry collection, published in 2020. The cover image is by Karen Bowers. https://www.karenbowersstudio.com/
OUT-OF-PRINT BOOKS of POETRY
EARTHWARD
Gathered to honor the memory of a poet friend who battled multiple sclerosis for forty-five years, the poems in this chapbook explore the cyclical patterns of life.
Reviews of Earthward
”What captivates me about Earthward is the way Maureen Eppstein transforms ordinary landscapes into miraculous acts of affirmation. Turning compost becomes an opportunity to ponder death and resurrection, braiding garlic reminds us of the ‘pleasure taken in braiding the hair of the beloved’. This is poetry of quiet lyrical depth, that reconnects us with land and spirit. Earthward invites us to stand deeply rooted in each moment, "in awe and wild surmise at all this human brain can not yet comprehend.”
–Devreaux Baker, author of Red Willow People
”In Earthward, Maureen Eppstein unites what would break us with what will bring us back to life. The wild ones, like us, must eat, and so kill. Lost sisters are mourned by proxy. Some things we love are transplanted and transplanted again, surviving and sometimes thriving. The tenacity Eppstein describes is the foundation of our lives. There are those who say that to write about the extraordinary one must look lovingly at the ordinary. Eppstein knows where, and how, to look.
–Camille T. Dungy, author of Smith Blue
ROGUE WAVE AT GLASS BEACH
A New Zealander by birth, Eppstein explores in these poems the arc of an expatriate's sense of dislocation through a deepening attachment to the adopted land and engagement with its people and politics.
Reviews of Rogue Wave at Glass Beach
”With a simple elegance yet passionate attention to nature, to the legacies of the land and people around her, Eppstein renders both the ant and the redwood unforgettable, and reminds us to stay awake, to praise each living, breathing being.”
–Dorianne Laux, author of Facts About the Moon, Smoke, and What We Carry
"In 'Manaia', Maureen Eppstein writes of a stranger who gives her ‘a carved/ and polished disk of bone...tail coiled like a fern frond unfolding...or a lizard, keeper of life and death.’ Rogue Wave at Glass Beach is much like this amulet, the poet's gift to us. As Maureen Eppstein says, ‘Nothing between us but this shared glimpse’-what could be a better definition of poetry?"
–Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line and Mules of Love
”Maureen Eppstein's Rogue Wave at Glass Beach is marked by the exilic errantry of a writer whose keen perception continually reveals the wondrous in the familiar. With roving eye and ear, her speakers negotiate the alien terrain of their own pasts, their bodies, and of our beautiful and strife-torn world. Through stunning images and sure music, these moving and admirably-crafted poems impress themselves upon us like the lineaments of place, reminding us that language is ‘the way we learn to belong.’
–Joshua McKinney, author of The Novice Mourner and Saunter
”Embarking on this journey with Eppstein, what was immediately apparent is the longstanding dedication to her craft, the caring for her words, her patience. She is a teller of histories, a weaver, of past and present, holding always in her weft a deep appreciation for those cultures who lived close to the land, close to the sea-and the plight in which they, all of us, find ourselves: landed now on these tamed shores of modern life. She touches-as every poet must-the mysteries of loss, of disappointment, of death. Her compassion for life is evident throughout, her feeling for the predicament of us all. And so she performs the poet's work: giving form in words to those feelings we sometimes cannot speak.”
–Michele Ketterer, Mendocino Arts Magazine
QUICKENING
In this chapbook, Eppstein expresses her sense of the connectedness of all things, from rocks to human life. She poses questions about our relationship as humans to the world around us - to wildflowers growing by the side of a road, to newts journeying to the clear streams of their birth. She embraces the cycles of life, from the quickening of an unborn child to premonitions of death.
Reviews of Quickening
“These eloquent poems appear at first to record detail, the ordinary, the everyday. They celebrate a swallow's nest, sand grains, even the growth of weeds. But there is a twist: these are also dark pastorals that-in the poet's words-review and regret "the damaged earth". Again and again, these poems return to defenseless nature, to creatures looted and evicted and to human lives hurt and interrupted. This shadowing of the relation between the poet and every kind of nature is the real theme of these fine poems. It deepens and sharpens their music.”
–Eavan Boland, author of Domestic Violence, Against Love Poetry, and The Lost Land
”With a naturalist's eye for the precise and sensuous image and a writer's care for the precise and sensuous word, Maureen Eppstein plants our human griefs into this book, roots them, and invites them to quicken into new life.”
–Jane Hirshfield, author of After; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and Nine Gates
”Quickening, the first movement of new life, is an apt title for this lovely collection of verse. Each of Maureen Eppstein's poems stirs me to think and feel more deeply about the beauty--and also the tragedy--of life's cycles. These are poems to read by the fire, images to soothe when feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of days trapped indoors, in an urban miasma. Reading this poetry fills me with gratitude for being a part of nature's webs. Eppstein writes in the tradition of Mary Oliver and Jane Hirshfield, with her senses awakened to nature's particular, and ever-changing, nuances.”
–Karen Lewis, Teacher for California Poets in the Schools
POEMS IN ON-LINE PUBLICATIONS
Canary, Spring 2011: “Blue/White”
https://canarylitmag.org/archive_by_author.php?id=98
Willawaw Journal: “Daughters”
https://willawawjournal.com/maureen-eppstein/
Poetry Pacific: “A Photographer’s Eye,” “Returning from the Food Bank,” “A Semblance of Normal”
http://poetrypacific.blogspot.com/2017/11/3-poems-by-maureen-eppstein.html
Snakeskin: “Triangle”
https://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/122tri.htm
Poecology: “Toxoplasmosis”
http://poecology.org/issue-2/maureen-eppstein/