A Little Breast Music
Poetry | Soft cover | 52 pages
“I think it was through writing poetry I really got to know myself. I just kept diving deeper, a goddess-mermaid plumbing her own depths, finding meaning . . .”
With poems titled “Give Me Liberace or Give Me Death” and “The Society of Lost Loves,” A Little Breast Music pulls the reader into the life and outlook of Shirley Brewer with grace, surprise, and humor.
Shirley Brewer retired as a speech therapist and began writing poetry after age 50. She earned her M.A. in creative writing and started her own business, Poetic License, in which she creates original, personalized verses for all occasions. She also writes poetry for businesses. Shirley has developed Plorkshops, which help people embellish their life journeys and learn how to open up to more creative paths. Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Comstock Review and elsewhere.
Shirley lives and accessorizes in the Charles Village community of Baltimore. Her definition of shame is a bare wrist.
“Shirley J. Brewer shows that the elegiac and comedic can be companions, and in fact can help register the variety of feelings associated with loss. She’s an artful blender of tones, and her language is imaginative and often full of a spunky verve, as in this conclusion to “How to Kill Time”:
Stephen Dunn
Gouge the eye of midnight,
mangle those miserable hands
that murdered summer.
How dare they govern the way we lose
light, the lovely length of evening.“
These poems are so alert to the reverberant specifics of life, so alive with sensory energy, that I lose myself (a benefit!) in the lost worlds they evoke. “A Little Breast Music” sings!
Thomas LUX
My father drove us into the country to watch trains
on Sunday afternoons in summer, the sun a golden gum ball.
We heard a series of whistles startle the air, felt vibrations in our young bones.
Even though it made us dizzy, we counted cars:
my brother’s singsong, my sister’s one, f-f-f-our, s-s-six, my fingers moving like castanets
— the caboose a red blaze. We waved at the engineers
until sunburned arms grew sore in their sockets, our voices a trickle, throats
soothed by cokes and crackers thick with cream cheese.
Between trains, my father made up tunes he played on a silver harmonica that dazzled in the
light. Beneath the breeze-filled trees, he closed his eyes and cradled his songs. I can see his
skinny legs — around his ankles loose brown socks, like bird nests fallen from a branch.
— “Between Trains”
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