Poetry Reading and Book Launch with Ann McNeal

The poems in The Spaces Between speak the quiet language of New England backyards and woods. Using images from nature, they portray subtle changes of weather both external and internal. Observations of a quiet pond, mathematics lessons in grammar school, the poignancy of autumn, all lead to accessible yet profound meditations on life and aging, They “take us into spaces of freedom, feeling, search, and faith,” says Robin Chapman, author of The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead.

  Ann McNeal has been a closet poet for decades, but took advantage of her retirement to burst into print with her new book, The Spaces Between.  Ann taught physiology at Hampshire college for 33 years. She’s had a couple of dozen poems published in various small journals such as Peregrine, Paper Street, Equinox, and other periodicals, as well as several anthologies, including On Retirement: 75 Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Solace in So Many Words (Weighed Words, 2011).

Pat Schneider, author, Writing Alone and With Others, and founder, Amherst Writers & Artists, said this about the book: “Quietly meditative, occasionally witty, and sometimes (this is a compliment) a little strange. The Spaces Between gives to the pilgrim, to the seeker, to the solitary heart in each of us a map back to ourselves.”