Catalpa--Poems by George Ella Lyon.

Catalpa is [Lyon's] richest and most challenging achievement, and it's republication by Wind is ... cause for celebration....
--- Robert West

Modest and unpretentious. . . . Whether she is describing her forebears, her children, or the life of her beloved Virginia Woolf, her ear is perfect, impeccable, full of lyric music.
--- Ruth Whitman

"Lyon is never trivial; she writes of things that matter--birth, death, family, community ... her metaphors are always vivid and fresh, and often brilliant.... Lyon's poems are visions to which art has given voice.
--- Jim Wayne Miller

George Ella Lyon's poems offer many gifts, but a focus on the search for ancestry seems to me the unique gift of Catalpa. This searching begins locally and reaches beyond the bonds that unite us all, Appalachian and non-Appalachian, man and woman, to the essence of our common humanity. Here we discover lives brought forth in words, "no waste and no hurry. . . tough as a poem for the burden that outlasts us, for a heart leaved with words like a tree."
--- Jeff Daniel Marion

From the Book --

The Syrup Bucket Lid

— for my mother

Round and silver the moon
golden and round the sun
pried off in yet another kitchen,
this time near Billie’s Branch.
When the tree’s blood was gone
the lid was an ornate tray,
a gleaming disc for a child
to hurl at the sky.
it was a mirror too
for faces not yet set,
for any unknown princess trapped
with a strict family in the sticks.
A strange gift it is,
the sun with its curled lip,
the moon with its face we cannot see
for the dark side of our own.