Review
Barbara Simila
“. . . impressive work. Her love for her life and her land come through so beautifully.”
Sy Syfransky, Editor, The Sun
“Tight, intriguing poems with a fine sense of form and language.”
Alvin Greenberg, Judge, Lake Superior Writers Series
Award winning poet, Barbara Simila, was born and raised in the Copper Country in the heart of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After several years of urban living, she returned to teach at Calumet High School, write, raise her children, and re-establish connections to the beauty of the people and places of the Keweenaw Peninsula. A series of her poems won the Finnish American Poetry Award in 1994 and another received an honorable mention in the Lake Superior Writers Series in 1995. She also was the winner of the poetry award for FinnFest 1996.
In Watermarks: Poems from the Coast of Keweenaw, a collection of thirty-one poems arranged in six chapters, Simila provides crystalline images for elemental forces. The style is spare, sensual, and reverent. Whether her subject is immigrant culture, ice-fishing, Finnish-American heritage, a mother’s relationship with her daughter, berry-picking, the special joys of a mid-life romance, or the preciousness beyond price of a mother tongue, at the core Simila’s focus is always the pristine beauty of nature, the dignity of humanity, and, above all, love. Her highly accessible and resonant poems are a great gift to readers of all cultures.
Poet Barbara Simila on the Keweenaw Peninsula shore of Lake Superior
Trout Fishing in Keweenaw
An art I thought I’d lost,
my hands numbed by years
of page leafing,
bread kneading,
having forgotten
the delicate touch,
the perfect balance,
the quick tension
between weight and hand,
but just til
the first one strikes.
“. . . A book you will keep on your night stand, the dog-eared pages opening on their own well-worn spots. It is almost a holy book.”
Marcelle Doby Williams
Finnish American Reporter
