Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
New Orleans Suite
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"The Keepers' Return" by Peg Lauber
-to the Gang of Four

For five days after the hurricane
no bird sang
in the 1,300-acre woods
though the big penned birds,
the whoopers and sandhill cranes
in the clearings, bugled the news
about terrible winds and rain.
Otherwise silence. On the third day
four keepers returned,
helicoptered in. All the birds
and animals, including the lions,
(and no one wants hungry lions),
were out of food and water by then.

All twenty chicks safe in the chick building.
Only two adult birds dead,
one "whooper," and one sandhill.
Another sandhill had gotten out
of his wrecked pen and disappeared.
When I heard that, I pictured him flying
up the levee, east over the Mississippi,
and across the endless oil and water there.

But he returned Friday, not flying but walking
through a break in the perimeter fence,
hungry, thirsty, and lonely as someone's
pet ring dove who came flying in
and landed on a keeper's shoulder.

Finally that Friday a few songbirds sang,
tentatively, getting louder and more numerous
all day, and the keepers wondered
how such small birds survived
and where, and was it God perhaps
repopulating the woods
and this was Bird Day?

In these poems, Peg Lauber tells the story of her romance with the city of New Orleans. She takes us on the road from Wisconsin to Louisiana and back, to adventures with endangered wildlife and dangerous surroundings, to exploration of wonderfully new old landscapes and discovery of pastimes she'd never have thought of back home. The poems sing with celebration, sometimes with apprehension and regret, all orchestrated with the sound of wings.

-Nadine S. St. Louis
author of Weird Sister

This evocative pre-Katrina narrative sequence depicts--with a mother's love, a reporter's tenacity, and a naturalist's eye--a journey to the heart of New Orleans and to a New Orleans of the heart. Whether writing about raising Cain or raising cranes, Peg Lauber captures the river, the birds, the fish, the snakes, the barge traffic, the strippers and prostitutes--all the sweetness and squalor, the festivity and fever, the miracle and mayhem of the human spectacle. Part celebration and part elegy, this book does what only poetry can do: makes a music of the mundane; articulates the inarticulatable; confers, through memory and imagination, an immortality on fleeting experience. Before reading this book, I'd never been to New Orleans; now, I feel that I have.

-Ron Wallace
author of Time's Fancy and The Uses of Adversity

These poems . . . give such a wonderful insight into New Orleans and the side of nature most people will never see or hear about. There is an extra bonus of the mother-daughter love growing visible in these poems. They make a fine collection.

-Mary Sue Koeppel
editor of Kalliope and author of
In the Library of Silences and Between the Bones