by Steve Pfarrer
TRAVELING ON MY OWN ERRANDS
By Margaret Lloyd
Gwasg Carreg Gwalch
http://www.margaretlloyd.net
Northampton poet and painter Margaret Lloyd has deep roots in Wales. Born in Liverpool, England to Welsh parents, she grew up in a Welsh community in New York state and has traveled and studied in Wales; she’s also written for Welsh publications.
In her newest work, “Traveling on My Own Errands,” Lloyd has tapped a series of mythological Welsh tales, “The Mabinogi,” for a series of poems written from the point of view of six female characters from the stories, which date from approximately 1100 AD.
“As convoluted and fantastical as are some of the events in ‘The Mabinogi,’ I found that as I immersed myself in the tales, the women became flesh and blood,” the author writes in a preface.
The untitled, free verse poems have a mystical and lyrical feel, anchored in the rhythms of the natural world. For instance, one of Lloyd’s female characters, Blodeuedd, betrays her lover, Lleu, and is turned into an owl, a hated nocturnal bird, as her punishment.
“When you look into the night and see nothing, / I might be there. Any being, really / can provide company, no matter how silent, / no matter how abject. It is presence, / and all too soon there will only be / a large absence.”
Another of Lloyd’s narrators, Branwen, sister of the king of Britain, becomes caught up in a war between the Irish and British that leaves almost everyone dead, the battlefield strewn with corpses.
“I hear the raven cry three times / before it flies to find another carcass / over which to hunch its shoulders, / under which to find the soft decaying belly. / I am done with it. And I am undone.”
“Lloyd succeeds in reimagining and reanimating the old tales in a startling original way,” says one review of the new collection. “A scholar’s meticulousness is visible here, enhanced by an almost uncanny and creative empathy, which the poet has for these characters.”
Margaret Lloyd reads from “Travelling on My Own Errands” Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Smith College Poetry Center in Wright Hall.
TRANSFORMING PROVIDENCE:
REBIRTH OF A POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY
By Gene Bunnell
www.transformingprovidence.com
When Gene Bunnell was director of planning and development for Northampton in the 1980s, he witnessed a formerly rundown town make a comeback, with new stores, restaurants and a growing artists’ community contributing to the town’s vitality.
In “Transforming Providence,” Bunnell, today a professor emeritus of geography and planning at State University of New York/Albany, examines how a much larger city — Providence, Rhode Island — reimagined and rebuilt its downtown sector beginning in the late 1970s.
Like a lot of former industrial cities in the Northeast, Bunnell notes, Providence — one the nation’s oldest cities — had fallen into decline by the 1960s, as some residents moved to suburban areas, jobs were lost, and the unimaginative layout of highways and railroads led to fractured city neighborhoods and visual blight.
But Bunnell, who began studying Providence on his own in the 1990s and then with some of his graduate students in the 2000s, examines how the city eventually made a comeback through careful planning, rezoning, renovation and creation of city greenspaces, among other things. His book includes numerous photographs outlining the changes.
As well, he notes, city and state officials worked with various nonprofit groups and citizens for years to make the improvements.
“It is this author’s fervent hope,” Bunnell concludes, “that people in other cities who read this book will come to appreciate the power of sustained focus, incremental changes, courageous exploration of options, and collaboration among citizens, politicians and the business community.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.