Crone’s Wines: Late Poems by Maggie Finch

I was honored to edit two of the four poetry collections by my mother, Maggie Finch: her first book Davy's Lake (self-published in 1992) and her last book, Crone's Wines: Late Poems (Word Galaxy Press, 2017).  The poems are meditations on love, nature, aging, and death, full of wisdom and humor.  Copies can be ordered here.

Margaret Rockwell Finch's moving lyrics are passionate and lightly elegiac by turns. They speak unabashedly about desire and the human heart, but without the taints of sensationalism or sentimentality. Speak, however, is not the right word; given the delicately turned musicality of these poems, the mot juste must be sing.
—David Yezzi

Haunted, burnished passion echoes through these deft and beautifully alert lyrics. Margaret Rockwell Finch uses poetry's traditional means to ends that are purely her own. From time's quarrels, she has fashioned poems that resonate with poetry's timelessness.
—Baron Wormser

Like the best of the chain of passionate women poets to which she belongs, Margaret Rockwell Finch is skilled in the perfectly torqued line, angled to pull power straight from the personal and often the collective unconscious. So many of these perfect crystals, forged with feeling and dignity out of the heart of experience, shine with the clarity of honesty and the strength of skillful craft. I am honored to count this poet as my literal and literary foremother.
—Annie Finch

The poems in Crone’s Wines often unlock the memories at the fringes of consciousness, making them come alive, or reflect on the mysterious and unspoken, casting them into the realm of the familiar. With a mix of formal and free-verse poems, Crone’s Wines is wide-ranging in style and scope: its many preoccupations include solitude, nature, family, love, even the lightheartedness of cat poems, and aging and death—as befits the “late poems” subtitle, informed by the poet’s age. There is a sense of the spiritual and meditative in the universal poems, and a fierce openness in the poems of personal relationship, often intimate in their recollections. This a rewarding collection with a lifetime of memories and experience, delivered with wit and wisdom.
—From the Publisher, Word Galaxy Press, a Division of Able Muse Press

THREE MOTHERS

From Crone's Wines by Margaret Rockwell Finch

I lay inside my darling mother
Warm embraced the sun of her womb,
Content to hear the seed of her singing
And thread my loom.

I lie inside my darling Mother
Here where Her shuttle voices move,
Content to sing the web of our weaving
And learn Her love.

I’ll lie inside my darling Mother
Deep and deep when the leaves fall—
Content to sleep in that silent music
And wait Her call.

Order Crone's Wines Here