Moments

About the Book

Mary Elyn Bahlert’s poems, written over a lifetime, reveal moments in her life that burst with joy, sorrow, memory, and love.

About the Author

Mary Elyn Bahlert grew up in a working class family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She attended public schools with dedicated, capable teachers, many of whom had immigrated from the Old World. These teachers loved good poetry and taught her to love good poetry by insisting that she – and all their students - memorize dozens of poems from Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, and others. She can still recite these poems, word for word, by heart, and she’s been writing her own poems since. Mary Elyn was the first in her family to attend college. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she majored in English and became acquainted with the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton. Following a successful career with the Federal Government, she attended the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, where she received a Master of Divinity Degree in 1984. She is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. She lives in a century-old Craftsman bungalow on a hill in Oakland, California, with her husband and cat. The poems in this collection are selected from a lifetime of Mary Elyn’s poems. Together, they offer moments in her life which still shimmer and shine and burn. Many of these poems, in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, were first written on scraps of paper and stowed away.