Patricia Monaghan, Ph.D.

Patricia Monaghan's book of poems, "The Grace of Ancient Land," has been published by the Voices from the American Land project, established to "revive and amplify a dominant tradition in American letters  — the poetry of place, whether urban, rural, or wild."  Monaghan's book portrays the little-known Driftless Area of Wisconsin, named for its lack of glacial soil or "drift" and the only area of the Midwest that has been untouched by glaciation for the last half-million years.  Of the book, editor Renny Golden said, "Her work falls in the tradition of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.” Yet it is a subversive moral vision in the tradition of Eavan Boland’s ethic of “powerful ordinariness.” Monaghan thus genders her land ethic. Monaghan does not mythologize the land but embodies its beauty and bounty in the luminous ordinary of planting, canning, the fleeting presence of deer and hawk. She implicitly links seasonal change to the cycle of birth and death. When she sees the hawk circling for field mice, she reminds us of the mortal path we trod and bids us to pay attention to what grace offers: the quickening unbidden moment."  More information atwww.voicesfromtheamericanland.org.