The range of her activity, observation, thought, and feeling in the poems in Web Songs shows that “All life is grist for a working poet’s mill.”

The depth and points of view of observation, thought, and feeling, the subjects used, and imagery created make poems that require spaced reading for absorption. A good prescription is “Take one nightly. Repeat as necessary.” And use a dictionary freely.

The notes below can only give glimpses of some of the many ways that subjects and images in Web Songs resonate with and challenge the reader — and they do resonate and challenge.

For example, the poet is the point-of-view character in a poem, but the poet who is the point-of-view character in these poems is not always Shirley Windward. Or concluding lines that make the reader say, “That does not follow,” may also make the reader add, “Oh, yes, it does.” Or words and combinations may require study before beauty and aptness register fully.

The poems are arranged in seven sections.

First is SOME EARLY STRANDS with vivid actions and
strong images of home and family. Especially touching is this one:

Next is LOVE THREADS, SPUN, which opens with
smile-producing “Bliss.”

After five hours of sleep, I come up from a dreamscape of great seas, my raft rocking on an emerald wave, a mighty silver fish sounding sixty feet away— to find my hand still lies coiled in yours.
	Click picture to download a readable (PDF) image.

After “Bliss” are three successive poems that require thought separately and together.

In “One Penultimate Love Song,” the poet creates idyllic images of literal and figurative connections that reveal what “Loving you means” — the last image that of wanting the last breaths of both to be in the same moment.

In “Lines for a Husband,” the poet and the beloved are “two tunes/ played together” at different tempos, in different registers, creating “dissonant triads.”

But they are lightly scored
and delicately played
and so sweet softly
do they disagree

that each atones for the other. The beginning is conflicting, not idyllic, but the ending makes the conflicts complementary.

In “Letter to a Departed In-Law,” the poet details what made the in-law unlikable, confesses that those matters caused admirable qualities to remain unseen and the in-law to be unattended in her last days. The impact of the poem makes the reader want to turn away or defend the in-law or forgive the poet or do all three.

ANACAPA INTERLUDE is a “Field Trip to Anacapa Island
in Eight Cantos.”

The reader never learns exactly who is on the field trip or the occasion of the trip but does get the essence of the experience of city teenagers on a wind-swept island.

The poems in CERTAIN ENTANGLING ENCOUNTERS make the reader uneasy but aware that the situations are part of life.

In “Give Us This Day,” pain is put into images that leave the reader with interpretations and then more interpretations.

“That Certain Smell” opens with a stand-alone line:
"I have smelled evil six times in my life."

FEY SPINNING TIME includes “After the Quarrel” —
an intense film of the quarrel with a high impact resolution.

And it includes “Web Song,” in which a maker of webs laments that she “could have spun a stronger web,” for “Now it hangs in shreds.” But she will mend it, and “by some distant week or a changeling month after that . . .”

I shall have spun — oh beautiful in that bedewed
     morning — a stronger, a wiser, a more
          irresistible web.
 

STATE OF THE ART includes “Five Reasons for Weeping”—

a set of scenes that may leave readers weeping or feeling that they are wept out.

The last section is SIGNALS FOR DOCTOR DEATH.

In “Second Testament,” the theme, the recurring line, “I am letting go” introduces familiar and unfamiliar tendencies, expectations, urges (clearly applicable to the reader) that once were strong but are no longer. Things being let go range from a simple action: “side-glancing into black store windows” to the sweeping complexity of “a greed for life.”

The last poem is “Visitation” in which the poet is visited by Death, who lists some of those who called for him that day. The list includes “In Greece, a million/ butterflies, on schedule. . . .” The poet goes “almost too far” with acknowledgment of Death, then engages Death in struggle.

  We fought with

amicable abandon, Death and I.

  All night. All night

we fought. He left me reasonably

impressed. For a week I was sore.

But he has not been around to court me

  with butterflies, lately.

The collection in Web Songs will reward you.

Keep Web Songs by your bed or reading chair.

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