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The Loving by Rena Gerhard

The Loving: Selected Poems by Rena Gerhard brings together her best poems over a period of five decades. These poems reveal her love for Jesus and God. Other topics include dance, family, coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, and inspiration to recover after brain cancer. Most of her poems are short and impactful. Her skill from traditional verse to modern verse is at once insightful, surprising, and relaxed, written with an ease that makes them feel like familiar and welcome friends.”It is an honor to read Rena Gerhard’s poems, to touch in after decades with her precision of imagination and her encounters with daily life, laced with the generosity and intimacy of a ‘trembling heart.’ I love how Gerhard envisions herself standing ‘at the door of a dark night’ and whistling as ‘the beautiful words come running.’ Yet she also wrote herself through suffering. She recognized that she would have to ‘look through the hollows between the words.’This memorial volume edited by her son, the poet Fred Gerhard, will stand as an enduring achievement.”-Heather H. Thomas, author of Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press, 2018) and former editor of Musings, poetry column, Reading Eagle newspaper”This collection¬ captures a lifelong love affair with words, faith, and family, inviting readers to dance through verses that resonate with emotional clarity and timeless grace.”-Peter David Orr, author of Beneath the Surface of Shadow and Light and With the End in MindAs the middle of the Twentieth Century approached, a young woman near Reading, Pennsylvania, took up poetry keenly aware of the thick, heavy glass ceiling hovering over every line she wrote¿she quietly kept at it, quietly riding that horse, as she notes in “Strange Steed”: “When the wise had gone to bed / To receive their well-earned rest, / Then I watched him as he fed, / And I sat his back, a guest / Instead.”-Rodger Martin, author of The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec, The Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective, The Blue Moon Series, and For All the Tea in Zh¿ngguó