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Clocks and Water Drops
by Marlene Hitt
118 pages / 74 Poems
Price: $15.00
ISBN 978-0-9819693-5-0
Publisher: Moonrise Press
P.O. Box 4288, Sunland CA 91041-4288
Order from Lulu.com , or on Amazon
Advance Praise:
Clocks and Water Drops is a book of treasured gifts packed in memories and reflections as tasty as homemade bread,
fanciful as a rose petal salad and healing as warm camphor oil on a child's skin. Marlene Hitt's astute and thoughtful
voice paints a world as gentle as lamb's wool and precious as a girl's first pony. Open this cedar chest of poems, don
its knitted socks and prepare to chase the moon through love and time.
Jack Cooper
Author, Across my Silence
Marlene Hitt is a poet beyond measure... she holds each thing to her eye and finds inner correspondences. She finds in the
mind- an empty glue a "back alley" and wonders what words to write, as we all do, on a blank page, or "the bronze grave
marker" she buys for herself. Each of her poems works on several levels, and almost always ends with a very interesting
surprise or revelation. The significance of each detail is stunning and inspiring. She sees objects as possessing uncanny
power. She recalls her feeling that the clock pendulum in the house has captured time with its sound, and stolen it from
her own grandmother. By her confident and consistent phrasing and exacting vision, she follows her own life from early
childhood to now. She calls upon us as readers to look at her life, and back into our own for the metaphors inherent and
active alive, in all of us today.
Kath Abela Wilson
Poet Artist, founder of Poets on Site
Marlene Hitt is an attentive poet, an inspired poet. She listens to the sounds of the past, disappearing from our elect-
rified, virtually connected lives: the "plodding of beetles," the ticking of the grandfather clock, the tapping of rain
on the windowsill. She watches shifting hues in the sky and the mesmerized faces of children "glued" to their TVs; she
sees how the children still brighten at the sight of the Christmas tree. Marlene shows her readers what a life well lived
could be; she makes her poems from family stories, community celebrations and discoveries in the back alley. She portrays
her grandparents and her children, yet she does not forget her neighbors, the homeless, the lost.
Clocks and Water Drops, her first full-length poetry collection, is a gift of "small things"; a gift of remembrance and
affection, a whimsical and wise offering of carefully calibrated images and reflections. We are thankful for the talent of
Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, a historian of local communities, and a treasure of poetry in the
Foothills.
Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.
President, Moonrise Press
About the Author:
Marlene Hitt is a Los Angeles poet, writer and retired educator with local history as an avocation. She has served for many
years as Archivist, Museum Director and Historian at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. She is a native Californian and a
graduate of Occidental College. She also studied at CSUN, USC, UCLA, Glendale College and Trinity College, Ireland. As a
member of the Chupa Rosa Writers of Sunland for nearly 30 years, she has worked with this small group of poets from whom has
sprung readings at the local library, the Poet Laureate Program of Sunland-Tujunga, and the currently popular Village Poets.
Her poetry received several first place prizes in annual competitions of the Women's Club, San Fernando Valley, and many awards
from the John Steven McGroarty Chapter of the California Chaparral Poets. Her work appeared in Psychopoetica (UK), Chupa Rosa
Diaries of the Chupa Rosa Writers, Sunland (2001-2003), Glendale College's Eclipse anthologies, two Moonrise Press anthologies,
Chopin with Cherries (2010) and Meditations on Divine Names (2012), and Sometimes in the Open, a collection of verse by California
Poets Laureate. She published Sad with Cinnamon, Mint Leaves, and Bent Grass(all in 2001), as well as Riddle in the Rain with
Dorothy Skiles, and a stack of chapbooks for friends and family. Ms. Hitt, elected Woman of Achievement for year 2001, served as
Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in 1999-2001, at the turn of the century. She has published several books on local history,
including Sunland-Tujunga from Village to City (Arcadia, 2000, 2005) based on columns written for the Foothill Leader, Glendale
News Press, North Valley Reporter, Sentinel, and Voice of the Village newspapers since 1998. Over the years, she taught in elemen-
tary school, worked in a pharmacy, chaired committees, tap-danced, and played English handbells, autoharp and ukulele. She dedicates
her successes to her husband, Lloyd, her children and grandchildren, her biggest fans.
From the Book:
What Am I Thankful For?
Marlene Hitt
Why, for this little seed
caught between my teeth!
This seed from berries
cooked into jam
mounded in the cut-glass dish
my mother gave to me,
sweet jam boiled
from my own berries
piled on bread
bought from Ralph's
just two blocks away,
bread made from flour
ground from grain
grown on great fields,
grain that drank rain
dropped from clouds
that were coaxed from the sea,
grain, fed by the sun
that hangs in the great galaxy
spinning the universe,
which hangs above this sweet earth
while it turns over and over,
where, under gathered clouds
heavy with rain
coaxed from the sea
which wakens the soil
rich with grain,
ripened kernels of wheat,
are milled into flour
to be baked into bread
which I can buy at Ralph's
just two blocks from here
on which I can spread
this mound of jam
resting in the cut-glass dish
my mother gave me,
sweet jam made from my own berries
whose little seed
is caught between my teeth.
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