The Task of Falling Rain

"the task of falling rain" is a full-length collection of poetry primarily about one woman's love affair with the natural world of forests in the Cascade Mountains and the Coast Range of Oregon; but also about love and loss, joy and sorrow, life and death. Jean Esteve, Oregon Book Award finalist in poetry, says Plummer's "narrator's voice moves from wistfulness through a kind of baffled anger . . . traces developments inside her] own mind and spirit." These poems are cut from the cloth of a long life, now filtered through the experience of living on the Central Coast of Oregon in sun and rain. Paulann Peterson, past Oregon Poet Laureate, remarks on Plummer's "marvelous names for rain" and says further, "Her poems . . . celebrate whatever rain touches and feeds." With the ever-present Pacific outside her window, Plummer becomes a minute observer of sea and sky and shore. Drew Myron, poet and teacher, says Plummer "writes 'The sea is always in my senses.' And now with her debut collection, it is in ours."

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Notă biografică

Shirley Plummer is a native of Oregon, born, raised and schooled in Salem in the Willamette Valley. In her mid-school years parts of summer holidays were spent in the Cascades, where she found a "home" in the forest. Later she felt an exile, and decades of moving house and traveling did not lessen her wish to return. The painful death of her beloved freed her to do so. She now lives on the central Oregon coast between the Siuslaw National Forest and the Pacific Ocean near her three children. Her older sister still lives in Salem. In 2011 her notebook declares, "I am a poet and this is my year," and a few editors began accepting her work. This volume is her first collection.