Blue Ribbons at the County Fair. Ellaraine Lockie

Blue Ribbons at the County Fair. Ellaraine Lockie. ( PWJ Publishing POBOX 238 Tahoma, CA. 96090) http://www.wellinghamjones.com $10.

Ellaraine Lockie is a well-known and respected poet in the big world of the small press. She has been nominated for Pushcarts numerous times, and has a plethora of publication credits on her long resume. This California poet’s latest collection is “ Blue Ribbons at the Country Fair.” Lockie writes about her conflicted relationship with her religion, infidelity, and her early years in the hinterlands of Montana, to name a few subjects.

Lockie is a keen observer of human character—its many flaws, warts; and is unafraid to put a bright light on her own. Being a cat lover, and the owner of a frisky feline MENOW, I enjoyed Lockie’s poetic tribute to her cat “ Cat In Her Empty Nest”
Here her cat replaces a daughter who left the familial nest. Lockie showers as much love on the scamp as she would a child or her child as in the case here:

“ He laps up baby talk
Caresses
Kisses
All my mother smother
A symbiotic pair
Only I can feed him
Groom him…

In return he muzzles
Purrs
Lap dances into my void…”

And in “Man About Town” Lockie notices an attractive down-at-the-heels man partaking in a buffet at a garbage bin:

“ Black leather blazer
Body cigar-straight blue jeans
tucked into boots
Dark hair growing out of his halfway
unbuttoned tan shirt
Two-day stubble and longhair look
Of a GQ model

Five sips of coffee later I look up
And he’s ransacking
the four trash cans out front
Toasting other people’s excesses
with paper cups
In moves as fluid as the lattes
chai and chocolate milks
that slide down his throat
He’s become a fine wine connoisseur
Who couldn’t be bothered to replace
hiking boots with soles wallet-thin
Whose domestic help forgot to hem
The lining that hangs below black leather…”

Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update