Reclaiming the Nectar and the Hum is a love letter to all daughters. It is an instruction manual on surviving complicated, unhappy mothers. It is a lament and a lullaby. It is a mother’s guide to loss, an inquiry into generational mysteries, and a song cycle of transformation.
Peg writes with honesty and humor illuminating the hard work of being a daughter, a mother, a woman. Her work is deeply personal and raises up the potential of the smallest things to bring us back to intimate connection with the world. These poems are gentle and loving, angry and clear.
Peg Edera’s powerful new collection Reclaiming the Nectar and the Hum is a book that begins with one wish and becomes a murmuration of wishes for past, present, and future generations. It is a book that takes flight, opening its pages like wings and lifting us up poem by poem to see the possibility of a new creation-a mended, reclaimed creation flying the banner of love. “Yes, yes, All of this,” these healing poems say to us. Edera’s book beats with a brave heart. Read it and feel that beautiful pulse all around you.
Annie Lighthart, author of Pax
Peg Edera’s courageous and beautiful poems move with and beyond grief-the death of an infant daughter, a mother’s long neglect-to become songs like “exhales of prayers.” In her poems, we encounter the luminous and the reclaimed, rooting ourselves in new, engendering ground filled with possibility. She dares us to “keep. . . eyes open to the chance of gleam.” Unabashedly, her poems seek to find a kind of dogged hope, framing the everyday world in a renewed attention like “the drifting scent of wild roses/ faded dish towels flapping on a line.” Immersed in her generous world, I feel reassured, listening for “the world’s hum rising.” I am ready to “believe that everything has an angel.”
Andrea Potos, author of Her Joy Becomes and Marrow of Summer
Peg Edera’s poetry is a north star for daughters who are reconciling the journey they travel with their mothers from birth to afterlife and back again. Throughout the manuscript, Edera offers a series of delicate imprints, wisdom “wrapped in cornhusks” and angel wings. She writes of beauty as an identity to be recognized and grief as a labyrinth to be honored with loving kindness. “If only we pay attention/ if only we slow down…” Edera invites the reader to parse moments of life, to taste the honeysuckle nectar, to pay attention, to sing an aria of mothers, daughters. Reclaiming the Nectar and the Hum is an invitation to remember dreams that have been set aside amid a maternal journey of “following our hearts.”
Gwendolyn Morgan, author of Flight Feathers
In 2018, I read Peg Edera’s book Love Is Deeper Than Distance, poems which brought into focus living life with her husband Fred, who, at the relatively young age of sixty-five, was struck with dementia and then soon after, ALS. Fred died at sixty-seven. In my testimonial, I wrote, “At the living core of this work is openness to loving.” I was moved by Peg’s capacity to stay with Fred throughout a harrowing experience. Now, five years later, I have in my possession another book of poems by Peg, and I am happy to say that these poems are an expression of an openness to living. The emotional range and concern of these poems is broader than loving. You will find poems that reflect the shadow-side of life. Peg’s fun, natural turbulence, reclaiming her life-the nectar and hum-is given room to play. In these poems, she stays with herself. Many poems have a particular gravity-they orbit and then land within the fraught and blessed relationship between mother and daughter. Reading them, you will appreciate this line from “Advice I Wish My Mother Had Given Me”: “Learn to speak your own language.” Peg is doing that. I encourage you to join her.
John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making
Peg Edera
lives and writes in Portland, Oregon, across the continent from her childhood home in Portland, Maine. She writes regularly in community where many of these poems were begun. She’s the author of three previous books of poetry, including Love Is Deeper Than Distance, also published by Fernwood Press.