Bøker av Marlene Hitt

This collection of 129 poems by Marlene Hitt (b. 1936) was written over a period of almost 40 years. The first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a member of Chuparosa Poets, Village Poets, and other poetry groups, Marlene Hitt practiced her writing in near isolation from the "official" poetry world, while dedicating her time to the local community, as a historian, poet, and activist. She was the first Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga, member of the Village Poets in 1999, and co-editor of our 10th anniversary anthology We Are here: Village Poets Anthology" in 2020 (with Maja Trochimczyk). This book is a fruit of her poetic insights, her gifts of keen observation, reflection, and vivid expression. In 2015, Moonrise Press published "Clocks and Water Drops," Hitt's first full-length poetry volume. The current collection reprints some of these poems, and gathers other work scattered in various publications over the years. But there are plenty of poems here that never saw the light of the day and are here to enlighten and inspire us. Poet and flautist Alice Pero (the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga) assisted Marlene in selecting poems from thousands of pages and arranging them into seven chapters with distinct moods, ending with an euphonious title poem "Yellow Tree Alone," that shines with the gold leaves of Marlene's unique talent.

"Clocks and Water Drops" is the first full-length collection of poetry by Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a former Director at the Bolton Hall Museum, a local historian, poet, and community activist. The book of reflections about her life, family and neighborhood changing through the decades, includes 73 poems in sections dedicated to: Children, Marriages, Portraits, Neighbors, Seasons, Small Things, Passages, and Farewells. The title captures the poet's fascination with the flow of time, as relentless and powerful as drops of water that can shape rocks and move mountains. Poet Jack Cooper praises Hitt's "astute and thoughtful voice" while Kath Abela Wilson admires her "confident and consistent phrasing, and exacting vision."