Self Help

For the retired and/or retiring, a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual, a poet's musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club.

Life could become a summer afternoon, a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout, part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next.

The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure--napping, complaining, gardening, volunteering, and so on. Observing time's curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging, and understanding more clearly every day that time doesn't exist anyway, the poet relishes moments, which are

... liable to be caught
like a leaf in the eddy of a brook, lodged
only long enough to look,

and which become her subjects.

""With wry self-deprecating humor, Elizabeth Poreba shares a clear-eyed view of the latter part of life. She pursues a quest for understanding as she intertwines urban existence, religion, and the natural world in unexpected ways, for example, inserting a dog--a labrador--as the means of preventing the loss of Eden and describing a grandchild as 'my DNA cunningly packaged, his little cap covering potential crackpot notions.'""
--Katrinka Moore, Author of Numa and Thief

""The speaker of these poems may be 'retired' from official service, but she is anything but retiring--the liveliness, the wry wit, the energy of these poems belie any protestations to the contrary. Whether focusing on the natural world, family, or our shared social environs, Poreba brings her crafty skills and sharp eye together with a consciousness of the spiritual element inherent in all experience. A delightful collection that bears re-reading to discover the depths beneath the poems' crystal-clear surfaces.""
--Amy Lemmon, Author of Saint Nobody

""The 'self' who helps us in Elizabeth Poreba's new book of poems is a being that, like Ariel, leads us from form to form, from air to earth to water and back again, sifting into scenes of the city and elements of nature with elegant and affecting energy. These poems offer us the precarious power of the liminal spirit in action, questioning and probing, giving us 'what is left/after the eye parses' while 'weaving/from water/my kind of coherence/gliding like/a key in the right lock.' The most sustaining sort of self-help guide, Elizabeth Poreba's poems open us to our vital hearts.""
--David Groff, Author of Clay

Elizabeth Poreba taught English in New York City high schools for thirty-five years and now volunteers as a docent at the Old Merchant's House in Manhattan, a tutor of conversational English at New York University, and a writer of letters to the editor for a couple of environmental organizations. She has published a chapbook, The Family Calling (2011) and a collection of poetry, Vexed (Wipf and Stock, 2015) Her poems have appeared in Ducts.org, First Literary Review-East, and Commonweal, among other print and online publications.