Oleander Marriage (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781952781292)

Oleander Marriage is the eighth collection of poetry from acclaimed author Eleanor Lerman. The poems in this collection ache with longing for days gone by; for the bond between mothers and daughters broken too soon; for nights spent in grim hotels; dawns clouded by lonely dreams; and roar with the grief of monsters who are not what they seem. How memory shapes the voices we hear in our thoughts as we grow older is also examined in these poems, as is the need to resist the inevitability of an elegiac season to come. In these pages, the author also considers how each life creates a unique treasury of souvenirs collected from all the things it hoped for as well as those it never found along the way.

In commenting on her work, celebrated poet Tony Hoagland put Eleanor Lehman in the category of "social" poets, those whose work "engages the reality of the collective, as well as the emotional concerns of an individual speaker." He noted that her poems are like stories that while rooted in the lives of individuals also reveal much about our shared universal constants.