Reading Margaret Coombs's new collection is like standing beside a waterfall, savoring the world and our human and more than human connections as if experiencing them for the first time. Many of the poems in Where Sweetness Falls with the Rain are love poems-about a marriage, the morning light, the river, the grackles, and pelicans. Other poems bear witness-to the loss of Wisconsin's ash trees and the curse of invasive plants-but also to Coombs's grandfather who served in the U.S. Navy and survived a submarine attack. Coombs's poems reassure us that the trees remember "the girl on the bicycle gliding through the woods." Inspiring awe, hope, and compassionate action, these poems are "a summer evening/underneath a pink-gold sky." They're the "seeds that will help us survive."
--Emilie Lindemann, author of mother-mailbox

The poems in Margaret Coombs's collection, Where Sweetness Falls With the Rain, are engaging, evocative, and eloquent. This emotionally moving book opens with the explosive "Girl on the Cusp," where "The girl knows only to judge women in the way she has been judged." "My Grandfather's Flags," introduces themes of family and patriotism: "When Grandpa looked at the flag, he saw faces of family and friends lost forever to war." The final poem, "Love Poem for Morning Light" includes the hopeful, "Every morning you make me want to live here." Their masterful, lyrical language give Coombs's poems a quiet strength.
--Fredric Hildebrand, author of Under the Dust of Stars, Northern Portrait, & A Glint of Light

As I read the poetry found in Margaret Coombs's Where Sweetness Falls With the Rain, I found myself intimately connected with the imagery in each of the three sections. The lines spoke to me individually yet cohesively together. "At the Center of the World, At the Beginning of Time" evokes a sense of beginnings when all was new and reminds us of our connection to nature and to other generations that came before us. In "Grateful" we see an ode to a river but also to a relationship and marriage within the passages. The author gives us a gift of carefully painted pictures that I did not know I needed to see.
--Laurie Petri, librarian, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point-Marshfield & Everett Roehl Marshfield Public Library

BIO
Margaret Coombs has published numerous poems, most recently in the journals Mad Swirl, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Verse Virtual, and Sad Girls Club Blog. She is a contributing poet to Mad Swirl magazine and an editorial assistant at The Solitary Plover: The Newsletter of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. She has published one chapbook under the name Peggy Turnbull with the title The Joy of Their Holiness (Kelsay Press). She earned a B.A. degree in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.L.I.S. at the University of Texas at Austin, and a G.A.C. in Library Management from the University of North Texas. She began writing a diary when she was 20 years old; it became a lifetime practice. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin Colleges and inspired by the landscape and history she lives near, she began to study, write, and publish poetry. Margaret and her husband Bob live in her hometown, Manitowoc, Wisconsin.