How The Earth Holds Us

The poems in How the Earth Holds Us span more than five decades in the career of Mary Holman Tuteur, a remarkable poet known to many as Maggie. As a protegee of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney in the 1960s, Tuteur demonstrated a keen eye for imagery, a sensitivity to rhythm, and an open-hearted honesty, qualities that she would hone as her life and her work grew deeper and more complex. Themes of intimacy and exile, grief and ecstasy, mortality, kinship, and the resilience of the creative impulse thread through the book’s seven sections, accompanied by the poet’s own dream-wrought and imaginative drawings. A foreword by Bruce Gibbs and an afterword and photographs by Louise Kleinsorge Williams offer context both for those familiar with Tuteur’s poems and those discovering her work for the first time.