Lessons From the Garden: Selected Poems and Essays

Lessons from the Garden is a memoir, a glimpse of the rhythm and rhyme of Kate Dahlstedt’s life through time. Some of the poems go back 40 years, from courtship to becoming a wife, stepmother and mother. Others evolved from her Hospice social work with dying patients as well as her work with military veterans. Mostly, they are reflections on the everyday, ordinary events of life, in a way that gives them greater meaning. Reading Kate Dahlstadt’s poetry collection, Lessons From the Garden, resembles a secret glimpse into the room where Penelope wove the tapestry that saved her life. In these poems are revealed the threads that created an alternately beautiful and painful pattern in the poet’s life: love, motherhood, time, war, loss, mourning, nature, the divine. No wonder one of the ancient symbols for soul is thread. Phil Cousineau, author of The Art of Pilgrimage and The Blue Museum: New Poems