Elaine Mott’s life work was
almost never published. Between growing up in Brooklyn in the 40s, and battling
depression and anxiety as a wife and mother, Mott penned exquisite verses that
few people ever read until her son submitted her collected work to a contest.
Sharon Olds, winner of the
2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, said of Mott’s work, “Her voice is genuine and
immediate. We hear it with the sense she is right next to us, singing directly
to us.”
This genuine voice earned her
the medal for the Mary Ballard Poetry Chapbook Prize by publisher Casey Shay
Press. Mott’s book, Splitting the Velvet
Dark, will be released in conjunction with April’s National Poetry Month.
Mott occasionally submitted
poems to magazines and anthologies and managed to place a few of them.
Dorothea Lasky, Poet and
Professor of Columbia School of the Arts, judged this year’s finalists and
lauded the collection as “a gift to us from Elaine Mott, who left behind a book
to guide us through our days.”
Elaine Mott’s son Aaron Mott collected
the poems and submitted them four years after her death. “Reading through her
work to put together the twenty poems in this collection gave me a way to
connect with her,” Aaron Mott said. “The poems were so evocative and revealed
so much of her inner dialogue that it felt like having a deep conversation
with her about her life.”
Mott was born in Brooklyn in
1946. She struggled with depression as she raised her son and daughter, a
recurring theme in her poetry. She retired to the mountains of upstate New York
with her husband of forty years until her death in 2009.
Perhaps most poignant of the
previously unpublished works as we listen to a poet almost lost to time is in a
verse from “Dragonflies and Green Rushes.”
It’s simpler to live this way, with my hands plunged
in the warm dirt
spreading out the roots of strawberry plants
than to walk in circles around an empty room
crying out to someone who can’t hear me
