Potato Soup
Posted by: Potato Soup in Creamy Potato Soup Recipe, tags: Backwaters Press, Clover Blossom, Corn Wheat, Edible Tuber, Feeder Calves, Fence Posts, Hardpan, Heartland Of America, Horticulturist, Jim Reese, Landscape Award, Lincoln Journal Star, Old Dog, Outbuildings, Potato Soup, Row Crop, Slough Grass, Top Soil, Urban Wildlife, Wooded AcreIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Potato Soup Poems from the Heartland of America by one of Nebraska’s most widely known poets, Twyla Hansen.
Customer Review: Jim Reese — Lincoln Journal Star
What you eat is what you plant, her mother always said,
that edible tuber common as dirt, a near-daily staple.
It’s no surprise this is one of the first lines of many peeling at and slicing into the heart of the Plain’s in Twyla Hansen’s new collection Potato Soup, just out from The Backwaters Press. Hansen has been unearthing the beauty and bones of Nebraska for sometime, celebrating a land and it’s character with inimitable clarity. The thing I’ve always enjoyed about Twyla Hansen’s poetry is that she’s not afraid to get some dirt under her nails. Hansen writes with a sure-footed integrity, uncovering secrets and scars while others are just beginning to scratch at the surface.
I live in skin handed down from a long line of Danish farmers,
From women and men of the soil, all imperfect, the genetics
of a double recessive all vulnerable and hard at work.
Scrape away the layers and there’s no writing anywhere to be found,
only dust and feeder calves and slough grass, the callous of contour,
fertility and row crop…
Fence posts. Corn, wheat, oats. Outbuildings that rose
board by board into sky, a young girl breathing haybale
and clover blossom and top soil, gritty as our old dog Brownie.
Hansen has had her hands in the hardpan since she was a child. She is a poet and horticulturist that lives and works here in Lincoln, where her wooded acre is maintained as an urban wildlife habitat, from which she won the Mayor’s Landscape Award in 1994. Potato Soup is an honest and rich collection that celebrates the human condition and heartland. Potato Soup is the Plains and its people.
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