Carol Hebald publishes new chapbook of poems, Colloquy

In these poems Carol Hebald’s “Colloquy” with the too-soon-departed father glitters with a honed craft as she poignantly grapples with a universe of personal emblems and elemental memories, invoking the natural world and conflicted love. For example, as she reports in these evocative lines from “In Memoriam”:
I feel your absence
more than I miss your presence.
Where you went I never knew.
The key my memory left with you
is underneath the snow…
Oh my father, I call your name
but cannot speak your name.
—Hugh Seidman, author of: Somebody Stand Up and Sing (from New Issues Press 2005)

Carol Hebald’s new collection Colloquy is an extraordinary achievement. It’s a dialogue between a young woman and her father, who died when she was a young child. Their voices, his imagined from beyond the grave, merge on and off through this lyric meditation. Even though the poems are connected, each poem is self-contained and remarkable, and many individual poems contain the full drama of the whole. Whether in the first or third person, an intimacy is experienced throughout. “How passionately we spoke, how well!” she says to her father, and this is so true of the poetry on every page.
—Barry Wallenstein, author of DRASTIC DISLOCATIONS, New & Selected Poems (NYQ Books).

Rivers of soft rain and storms of hot blood run through Carol Hebald’s new and most impassioned collection of poems. COLLOQUY is a beautifully crafted work of yearning memory that explores the dark worlds of temptation, seduction, and abuse, and the final journey to forgiveness and light in the history of a daughter’s and father’s love.

—Martin Tucker, author of PLENTY OF EXITS, and Editor-Emeritus of CONFRONTATION Magazine.