LATEST NEWS Diana is pleased to announce the publication of Walk Me to Schenectady, her seventh volume of poetry, published by Depot Books, and beautifully designed and produced in a fine letterpress clothbound edition by San Francisco's Arion Press. This latest book celebrates the life and mourns the death of Diana's husband, Mel Fiske, who died on January 17, 2008. Of this new book, poet and scholar Sandra M. Gilbert has written, "[Diana O'Hehir's] work has always been compelling, marked by a uniquely charismatic voice and a daringly honest imagination. The new poems have all these qualities, but they are also notable for the deceptively simple, apparently naive nakedness with which they grieve the death of O'Hehir's husband of many years, Mel Fiske. Walk Me to Schenectady is an extraordinary sequence of what have lately been called 'anti-elegies': vivid, personal poems of mourning that refuse the conventionally consolatory closure of the traditional elegy....These are brilliantly artful public poems in the mode of the letters to the dead produced by such artists as Donald Hall and Ted Hughes, but with at times an almost surreally comic twist, as in 'Pilot Me,' a dirge for the poet's mother, dead at 28 ('She was just learning to inhale'), or 'Darling' ('I was the wrong kind of teacher / I told my students everything'). These poignant shapes of grief will bring ironic twists of recognition along with indrawn breaths of pain to all who have mourned or know that they must inevitably mourn." Poet and translator Chana Bloch adds, "A beloved teacher to many generations of students, Diana O'Hehir is still writing away energetically, rubbing words together to create sparks." WALK ME TO SCHENECTADY "Darling" I was the wrong kind of teacher. I told my students everything. He's my ex-husband; he's been here for three days; I really like him. They lined up at the classroom window, solemn and intense, agreeing He's darling. Of course you've got to marry him. When I said, He hasn't asked me, they weren't impressed. Marriage is a meaningful commitment, Lani pronounced, hitting her T's hard to show the stud in her tongue. BUY THE BOOK from Depot Books or Amazon. SUMMONED SUMMONED was my first book of poems, published in 1976; it was the winner of the Devins Award of the University of Missouri, and was published by their press. I said on the flyleaf that I thought of my poetry as rhythmic, visual, and surreal, and that I hoped that the poems evoked strong feelings. BUY THE BOOK from Amazon. "Lightning" I've been struck my lightning only once, It soaks you down, dissolves your bones to soup, Rattles your eyes like castanets. THE POWER TO CHANGE GEOGRAPHY THE POWER TO CHANGE GEOGRAPHY was published in 1979 by Princeton University press and was the winner of their nationwide contest to select the new entry in their Contemporary Poets Series. Carolyn Kizer said of these poems: "Diana O'Hehir's passionate vitality so suffuses her tragic sense of life that we are exhilarated by it." BUY THE BOOK from Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. "They Arrive This Morning" Those invaders from space will set down in a blue light, climb out of their Pale machine carrying their charts, globes, Maps of the rivers of the heart, their diagrams showing That country we all long for. HOME FREE HOME FREE, my third poetry publication, was published in 1988 by Atheneum Publishers and was a winner of the Di Castagnola Award. The New York Times said of this collection, "The oblique and private darkness of Diana O'Hehir's earlier work has been wrenched open in these new poems, its latent violence confronted. . . In this catalogue of farewells, she betrays an otherworldliness that chafes against its own disassociation. The elegiac character of these poems shows us that the human spirit is tenuous in this earthly realm, tethered only by language, by memory and imagination." BUY THE BOOK from Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. "Waking" They buried me in gold, stopped my mouth in copper, Coated my chest with a turquoise bird, Swaddled my thighs in a metal pouch, Poured over me the lid of night, Perfectly fitting, not heavy enough. SPELLS FOR NOT DYING AGAIN SPELLS FOR NOT DYING AGAIN was published in 1996 by Eastern Washington University Press and received the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. Reviewer Jack Foley, writing in Agni Review, says: "In affirming magic ("spells") as the center of her work, Diana O'Hehir is not merely dealing with a theme. She is attempting at some level to turn her book into a power object, she is conceiving of the book as something magical, alive. Spells for Not Dying Again constantly moves us towards the perception of the inextricable mixture of life and death which is the center of any writing. In like a Falcon, out like a Phoenix." BUY THE BOOK from Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. "Spell for Protecting the Heart After Death" My heart, my mother heart, Heart of my living on earth. Spirits, don't grab this heart with your fingers, Don't steal and crush my heart, It belongs to the living who walk about in the city. When I was a child my heart shone in its egg, My grown heart rose like a heron, cackled like a goose, my aged heart Lay under the back-bent sky, was a dark stone in the sky's belt. I have also been the author of two poetry chapbooks: GRACE, Eucalyptus Press, 1992, and LOVE AFFAIRS, Depot Books, 2002. And I am co-editor, with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, of an anthology, MOTHER SONGS, Poems for, by and about Mothers, Norton, 1995.