Poetry For Tough Times

Donna Marie Merritt

"Job Loss: A Journey In Poetry" Release Date: October 2010
"Cancer: A Caregiver's View" Release Date: April 2011

About The Work:

Merritt's poetry is fresh, and refreshing. A blend of gentle ironic humour, expressions of inevitable frustration and loss and measures of gain and perspective. Making room at the table for the houseguest one hopes will go away: losing one's job, struggles with health. Written in a variety of poetic forms ranging from free verse to Haiku, we are taken on a human journey of spirit and practical matters.

Inspired and catalysed by personal insights and direct experience, each poem is a step forwards to recovery, even when representing a fall backwards. Just as this transition occurs, there’s another blow as her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Life, ultimately, is about change and about adapting to that change. It is also about the need to express. The result is a two-volume collection of work about the most difficult of things that we may experience. It is indeed Poetry For Tough Times with an upward and outward look towards an encouraging future and an inward meditation of the strengths that sorrow and joy can build and create.

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About The Poet:

Donna Marie Merritt’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and school writing programs. Her most recent poems were printed in Book Links (a publication by the American Library Association) and in an anthology from the National Council of Teachers of English, Dear One: A Tribute to Lee Bennett Hopkins.

She is also the author of 15 award-winning books for children and a former columnist for Teaching K-8 magazine.

Visit Donna’s site at www.DonnaMarieBooks.com.

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