The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas

Poetry by Cathy Smith Bowers

2nd edition
104 pages
$12.00
Published in 1997
ISBN: 0-916078-43-4

Cathy Smith Bowers' first book of poetry was first published by the Texas Tech University Press in 1992, where it was the first winner of the TTUP First Book Award (subsequently named the Walt McDonald Award.) The hard cover edition (ISBN 0 89672-301-1) went out of print in 1997, and Iris Press brought out this high quality paperback edition that same year. This book contains 48 poems. There is also a preface by Walter McDonald and a forward by Stephen Corey.

Praise for The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas

These are poems of passion and rage; of quiet reflection and exhilaration. They express in precise language--whose impetus is the poet's clear vision--the deepest yearnings of ordinary people: young and old, healthy and infirm, they are all looking for, in a terrifyingly indifferent universe, their moment of perfect beauty, joy, or peace.
In The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas Cathy Smith Bowers comes to terms with the power granted by pain and with the terrible beauty to be found in ordinary lives.

--Judith Ortiz Cofer

Her diction is ever the plainest, simple and sauceless...She has forsworn rhinestone and sequins, but her lines are more comely for her modesty--and more moving too.

--Fred Chappell

Cathy Smith Bowers' emergence as a poet has been astonishing in the degree that she has taken possession of loss and made it a gift, and she has done it everywhere with courageous wit and in language that sings as well as it talks. And what a journey this poetry marks. From the Carolina mill town of her birth to a Buddhist temple in Malaysia, she plots the cartography of a personal life in which we are made welcome by the luckiest empathy, style. These are poems that love us as well as themselves. To read them is to touch a life.

--Rodney Jones

 Cathy Smith Bowers thinks in metaphor; her poems combine a measured, adult sadness with the erotic pleasure, first learned in childhood, of tracing connections and resemblances. And like a true poet she honors--and not only in her poem "The Flower We Could Not Name"--the considerable part of our experience that lies beyond the call of even her bright articulations. What a fine book she has given us!

--William Matthews

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