The Watchful Heart Recedes

With a steady, approachable voice, Ellen Gerneaux Woods' debut chapbook The Watchful Heart Recedes explores both the tenderness and the tension woven into the mother/daughter bond. She roots her poems in the natural world, beginning this graceful collection with primordial jellyfish and ending with a backyard's damp grass. As she meditates on the pleasures and paradoxes of single parenting she embraces walnuts, redwoods, racoons at dawn, crows, wild iris, weeping willows, a beloved dog leaving for a new home. In these quietly profound poems Ellen Gerneaux Woods engages with the beauty and wisdom of our earth and our hearts.

-Kathleen McClung, author of A Juror Must Fold in on Herself and Temporary Kin




Anyone who has participated in raising/nurturing a child, and finding the way to continue to nurture even when that child has reached adulthood, will appreciate "The Watchful Heart Recedes" by Ellen Gerneaux Woods. In spare language that respects the intensity and reserve that will safeguard the mother/daughter bond, Ms. Woods guides us gently, movingly, through the stages of parenting through the mystery of Nature's great gift of life, to the recognition/adoration of one child's special gifts, to the urgent call to protect and hold close, then to release and wait. Finally, to welcome back the bond and all it may cost. And in the end, to return to her original family bond, which taught her how to be a good mother.

-Grace Marie Grafton, Lens, Jester, Whimsey Reticence and Laud, Other Clues




Ellen Gerneaux Woods' The Watchful Heart Recedes explores the tension implicit in maternity, the mother keeping her gaze on her child while still holding awareness of her own "watchful heart." In these courageous poems we accompany the poet in exploring the connections motherhood brings, "a silver ribbon [that] pulls us to claim it," a ribbon stretching from herself to her daughter and looping around memories of her own mother, "this woman who loved me / in her own way." The poet claims and celebrates these relationships, of love mixed with pain "shooting upward / almost to my heart," of misunderstandings and struggles, and the ache of her child growing beyond her care. We share the poet's journey as she returns again and again to the solace of nature, claiming her true self "engaged with earth."

-Lisa Rizzo, author of Always a Blue House and In the Poem an Ocean