December 1, 2011
Beclee Wilson Booksigning

Sunday, Dec 18, 12:30pm
Green Gulch Farm Wheelwright Center

Beclee Newcomer Wilson and her husband John Wilson have been closely associated with San Francisco Zen Center for many years. Please join Beclee to celebrate her latest book, Winter Fruit, a collection of poetry with a cover illustration by Beclee.

Winter Fruit is a collection of poems—intimate and accessible, deep, and touched with a soft irony. Beclee Wilson places life experience, nature, and the writing of poetry under a magnifying glass and ponders what nourishes. There is a harvest to be gathered from these poems—a way to wisdom and endurance made accessible by a wise woman.”

Beclee Newcomer WilsonBeclee Wilson is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Woman in Bits and Pieces and Tassajara Wind. A graduate of Northwestern University, with a M.A from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, poetry has always woven itself through her personal and career pursuits. She has studied with Jane Hirshfield, Brenda Hillman, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arthur Sze at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Beclee has also taught poetry in the Saint Helena Elementary School. She lives with her husband in the Napa Valley of California, where gardening, growing grapes, painting, and writing fill her days.

Like “marks in thin graphic strokes,” Beclee Wilson composes a moving suite of elegiac poems attuned to empty spaces, to love, to the passage of time, and to what endures.  –Arthur Sze

A sweetness runs through these quiet poems—sadness and the color of a garden, of a river rippling by, of oak leaves and tree lichen. Things that are true, that last, that pass away: “secrets too good to shout.”  –Norman Fischer