Last Updated: August 6, 2010
About Judy
Judy Kronenfeld is a poet, a more occasional writer of fiction and
creative nonfiction, a retired teacher of Creative Writing and
English (Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University
of California, Riverside), and an Associate Editor of the online
poetry magazine, Poemeleon. Her second full collection of poetry,
Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, won the 2007 Litchfield Review
Poetry Book Award and was published by the Litchfield Review Press in 2008.
"Judy Kronenfeld’s poems celebrate the world. Her eye for detail,
exact and first-hand, coupled with her daring and intelligent
arrangement of events, accomplish what poems at their best should—
they cherish and preserve our lives so that we might find meaning
in them alone—if we have to—as they shine in memory. . . . ”
Christopher Buckley
“. . .With consummate skill, capacious feeling, and keen-eyed
intelligence, Kronenfeld apprehends and renders ‘the terrible
world’ as being awash both in darkness and possibility, while
offering the reader astonishing moments of self-knowledge, awe,
gratitude, and reverence. . . .”
Maurya Simon
“Light Lowering In Diminished Sevenths gives us Judy Kronenfeld
at the height of her powers. In this generous collection of poems
of memory and aging—her finest work yet—Kronenfeld writes with
that sensuous cherishing of the world savored only by those who
sense how easy it is to lose. . . .”
Molly Peacock
Also a scholar, Judy Kronenfeld has published an
historical-cultural-linguistic study, KING LEAR and the Naked Truth:
Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke University
Press, 1998), which
Debora Shuger
called an “exciting, thoughtful,
and challenging book” and one that “offers a subtle and powerful
model of historical change.”
NEW WORK
Cool Santa Anas
Whole days made up of intensities
of light—as if the rays that pierce
clouds in Baroque paintings
were gathered in multiple sheaves
and fanned out melting
into that cloudless profound
blue that beams
I am purity incarnate—
and an excitement,
as if of revelation about to come,
in the basking honeyed warmth
lifted and swept away by currents
of chill, then set down again—
tumbleweeds bounce up
like girls playing hopscotch,
leaf crumble, small twigs, scurry back
on the sidewalk, like water sucked
into the ocean before the next wave.
And then quiet.
And isn’t that what
we need — a perfection of contentment edged
by violent change, change edged
by contentment, never to be grounded,
as the body grounds itself to a drug
which then loses its rush, over
and over again to be removed from
and returned to our illusions:
that if only we could stop
doing what we must do now, stop
shunning what we once did, leave home, come
home, burn home, build home,
we would arrive
at happiness.
…Leaf litter lull on the lawns, then
cottonwood gold gyring, like wheat
tossed in the air, revealing the sinuous
wind…
