New Poetry Collection
In Remember This Day, Linda Drattell portrays the ordinary in everyday life with warmth, compassion, and a soft brush of understanding. In a clear and respectful voice, she champions the natural world and gives credence to its vulnerability. Witnessing a tree as “the raw wind mauls its branches”, she concludes that “not even Death can erase those precious defiant moments it spent on Earth”. Drattell’s beloved horse, who she imagines saying, “A bit rusty, but I’ve still got it in me”, reminds the reader that “Old age is nothing”. As long as she can “inhale the fragrance of fresh cut grass”, she is “delighted I can still detect it”. This collection also tackles the extraordinary. While watching Bastille Day fireworks with her husband, gunshots caused them to flee and hide. The reader feels Drattell’s guilt— “I led us to a place with no escape”—and cheers for another time when “I’m smiling, my brown hair mussed by the wind”.
–Constance Hanstedt, author of Don’t Leave Yet: How My Mother’s Alzheimer’s Opened My Heart and Treading Water
“Linda Drattell‘s poems immerse the reader, in tender moments with her beloved aging horse and menagerie of goats, in the endorphine high of running, and in the book’s climatic poem “Promenade des Anglais” which recounts a traumatic event that will replay in the reader’s mind long after turning the final page. Linda writes poetry to be savored and re-read.”
–James Morehead, Poet Laureate – Dublin, CA and author of “canvas” and “portraits of red and gray.”
“In REMEMBER THIS DAY the clean slate of nature, free from irony and bitterness, teaches us city dwellers it’s age-old, quiet, modest and heroic wisdom about mortality, aging, loss, defiance, mobility, compassion and courage. We are lifted to those moments and when we return to our present we see it with new eyes.”
–Mary Rakow, Ph.D., award winning novelist and freelance editor: www.maryrakow.com
Remember This Day won a bronze award from the 2023 Reader Views Choice Awards.
