PRESS RELEASE
For
Immediate Release: May 4, 2005
Fishing Secrets of the Dead: Shore Poet Debuts First Collection
of Verse
CHESTERTOWN, MD - Meredith Davies Hadaway, vice president
of college relations at Washington College, has released
her first collection of verse, Fishing Secrets of
the Dead. A finalist in the Word Press First Book
competition, Hadaway’s collection embodies precise
lyricism while delving into a watery world of birds and
fishermen, hearkening to the litany of voices, memories,
calls and noises that haunt the Eastern Shore landscape.
Hadaway, who lives on the Chester River, returned to school
to earn her MFA in Poetry at Vermont College after the
death of her husband. In September 2000, she began assembling
the manuscript as part of her thesis requirement.
“My work is inseparable from the landscape
and the river,” Hadaway says. “The poems say
as much about nature as they do about love and loss. Each
encompasses the other in a connection that is seamless.”
Interspersed among the poems are drawings by her late
husband, Cawood Hadaway, a wildlife artist, avid fisherman
and teacher at Queen Anne’s County High School and
later at the Gunston Day School. His work captures the
images of the heron, ducks and kingfishers that inhabit
the Chester’s banks, marshes and coves.
“I thought of the river outside my window as a structural
element in the book,” Hadaway says. “The poems
move forward and backward through experience and memory,
through grief and consolation with a motion that feels
tidal.”
Critics have praised Hadaway’s poems, which have
appeared, or are forthcoming, in Absinthe
Literary Review, Ellipsis, Isotope,
Lilliput Review, MARGIE, Currents,
the Delmarva Quarterly, and the Milestone.
“These
poems are so clean and spare and poignant that they contain
what can only be called truth and like truth they provide
solace but not comfort,” said Michael Collier, poet
and director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Dave Smith, Elliot Coleman professor of Poetry at Johns
Hopkins University, observes: “Sometimes as terse
as Emily Dickinson, Hadaway is certainly the voice of
Maryland’s Eastern Shore in these poems that are
as sweet and true as a cleaned shell shining in the hand.”
A resident of Chestertown whose full-time job is directing
Washington College’s Office of College Relations,
Hadaway is also an accomplished harpist who has performed
in the United States and Ireland.
Fishing
Secrets of the Dead is available for $17.00 from
local booksellers, online from Word Press (www.word-press.com),
or through Amazon.com.
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