“These are poems I want to carry around and read to friends at crisis moments in their lives.” —Toi Derricotte
Madeline Tiger: Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000

 

“To read Madeline Tiger’s poetry is like flowing with the river of life itself. Quickly, slowly, around bends and curves, dashed over stones, full of human traffic. Life, love and death are her subjects—not the abstractions but the details, and she gets the details right.”—Alicia Ostriker

“As beautiful as [these poems] are on paper, they are musical in the way old-fashioned rhyming poems are: they go into you and stay... Her courage to tell the truth wins our confidence... I don’t know of any books of poetry that address subjects that are so difficult to talk about (a son’s death, abuse of another son... the violence in her marriage). These poems skirt the pitfalls of autobiographical writing because of their unsparing look at the speaker, and because of their lucidity in form, emotion, and idea. The poems are intimate..., yet the language is so precise, the forms so exquisitely wrought that it gives each a feeling of sculptural weight... of iron or clay.”—Toi Derricotte

“I much admire Madeline Tiger’s poetry of observation, her keen memory and her holding of things dear... But I also admire her poems of pure imagination, dreamy and scary... Some of the poems are heartbreaking, but she faces her heratbreaking experiences with the bravery of good music so that there is no fake comfort. I look at these poems of thirty years and realize what a strong poet she is...” —Gerald Stern

“Having sailed the seas of love and loss, Madeline Tiger finds terra firma in the word, in the poem. Here is the result: 30 years of courage and craft, passion and precision, in a rock solid addition to the contemporary canon.” —Paul Genega

“...Birds of Sorrow and Joy is a compelling book that celebrates intimacy and the practice of leaning into life despite difficult challenges. The poems unabashedly draw the reader into the felt sense of a moment... the poet... explores hard questions, meanings, and the sometimes painful insights that ultimately connect us all. These exceptionally well-crafted poems successfully carry the emotional weight of this fine collection.” — William Kelly, Multicultural Review

Madeline Tiger has worked as Artist-in-Education in New Jersey schools and is a “Dodge Poet.” Her many publications include My Father’s Harmonica and White Owl. She lives in New Jersey where she raised her five children.

ISBN 0-9713332-9-7 $15.00

 

The Fist
for my son in the I.D.F., 1982

There is no feeling in
the fist of revenge
the tactile sense
is compressed in this
obliviousness, the fingers
twist into the lifeline
the thumb
keeps them down
holds them in place

If there are nails
past the tips, they
cut the palm
below the line of
the fingers' roots
at the first knuckle
where the skin shines
like the transparency of
a forced grin, stretched
over the little battle hills
of bone

but if the nails have been pared
(or bitten) down
to the quick, then
in this furious grip
the fingertips themselves,
having lost touch
with the whole world outside
(the world of warm baths and
cotton shirts and the child's clasp),
will suddenly know their own
pain from the inside;
and the sharp tooth of this is
the same as the palm's pain
under the numb wrack of the knuckles
bent past ordinary strength,
and the old pain
of the heart, clenched

 

Ars Poetica

i Poetry
begins in psychiatry
and ends

in carpentry; Christianity
was the
opposite

ii

The poet talks
hard, praying
backward to her-

self & finding
no Messiah
but ghosts, no

rock
but the work,
no truth

but in the word,
no power but in
form,

no Master
but the crafting,
no disciple

but the echo, and
only at her desk
a place to kneel