Moving

Moving is a life journey about the search for home: imaginative, spiritual, emotional and actual. Underlying the poems are two lost homes—the poet’s childhood home which she moved from when she was seven—and her mother’s—a home shattered by her own mother’s illness and her little brother’s death at seven.

In the book’s first section, “Ghost Tree,” the poet searches for the stories she was never told about her ancestry and tries to locate herself in her life with the few shreds of knowledge she has.  In the second section, “Thresholds: On and Around,” the search takes her to Greece and Egypt, where she finds spiritual renewal in ancient temples, landscapes and goddesses. She finds archetypes of home, good and bad, in her reading, and, traveling to Chile, delights in the blend of art and life, imagination and humour, in the homes of Pablo Neruda. In the third section, “Arrivals,” she finds resolution in dailyness, in freedoms both small and soaring, and in herself, as she finally leaves “grey” behind.

“Elizabeth Greene’s Moving is richly well-travelled, from the deep space of Egypt to the Neruda-soaked colours of Chile, populated by goddesses, literary gems, mythological figures, and messages from the Tarot that resonate like a Greek chorus. “… I grew/from certainty/to mystery,” she writes: an act of both courage and hard-earned craft.But the book’s most compelling journey is the one where Greene“translates myself to myself,” a passage through personal history, inherited loneliness and a faith in the unknown so strong that the poems enter even the most ghostly moments with startling physicality and a commitment to the truth.”
—Barry Dempster

“Elizabeth Greene’s poems embark on a true voyage in her latest collection, Moving. She visits the altars of the past and warms their old stones with an inheritance of questions. And like a true voyage, these poems make the return trip home, crossing over thresholds, on this far side of fear, with both the rush of an initiate and the pace of a seasoned poet.”
—Sue Goyette