REVIEWS & COMMENTS
Page by page, secret by secret, this book dazzles, disarms,
and gathers force. Here is art stripped of its artifice.
Heartbreakingly tough, breathtakingly tender, these poems
make soundless crossings over the threshold of grief.
— Nance Van Winckel
In Fishing Secrets of the Dead, Meredith Davies
Hadaway pays attention to experience by noting the dance
of “fog and shadow” that shifts and turns
to reveal the strange familiarity of a moment. This she
uses to describe the difficult and too-early death of
her husband and its aftermath, which finds her trying
to differentiate “darkness and darkness.”
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.
— Michael Collier
Hadaway’s beautiful poems of love, memory, and mourning
introduce us to a sensibility tempered by loss and tuned
to the truth that grief teaches: the dead, as Hadaway
movingly observes, are “the secret we cannot tell”—except
when we tell that secret in poems as mysteriously purified
and shapely as these wistful elegies for a husband too
soon dead and wise meditations on the irrecoverable possibilities
of the past. Fishing Secrets of the Dead marks
the debut of a haunting lyrical voice.
— Sandra M. Gilbert
The reader will discover soon enough the author’s
late husband stands as the elegized subject in a wonderful
romance that is powerful poem after poem. But the sudden
lyric hymns to rivers, birds, fish come with additional
impact and the openness of clearing skies after storm.
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 sea-cleaned shell shining
in the hand. Moreover, they resonate with time’s
big story. Fishing Secrets of the Dead is an
auspicious, welcome poem.
— Dave Smith
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