Pillow Fight By Marjorie Gowdy

The chapbook “pillow fight” expresses the evolving effort of this poet’s search for forgiveness and contentment during the final decades of her life. As she walks around her farm in a verdant valley at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, Marjorie Gowdy sees in the seasonal movement of birds, bears, and bobcats the struggles all creatures attempt to surmount. An individual may dig their own trap, building a refuge within their surroundings, but most of humanity shares a hunger for tranquility, a peace the natural world best offers.

The landscape of the southern U.S. – mountains, ocean, and gulf, veins of deep tragedy – is Marjorie’s home. Writing is her comfort, one she has returned to again and again throughout her long life. Writing allows Marjorie to talk about joy and about pain, and it also has always permitted her to share stories of others in this world.

Marjorie is fortunate to look out each morning at a broad, wild pasture and animals preparing for the next season of their lives. Many people are not so fortunate, but she has lived in their shoes at times as well. She has always been, and remains, perplexed by the small but intense fraction of the unkind, the impatient, and the greedy. She tells us that she has had great losses and has also tripped and fallen. While the losses and subsequent fall haunts her, Marjorie now strives to find ways to rise and find decency around her. “I fail daily at this,” Marjorie says, “but as one friend told me long ago: ‘You always seem to put your shoes on the next day.’”

It is this poet’s wish that readers will also find in these poems ways to walk forward in peace.