Childhood's Secret Hidding Places
and Other Poms
by Olga Grush
My mother
was born Olga Marion Olson in Superior, Wisconsin in 1912 to John and Sophia
(Swenson) Olson, Swedish immigrants who settled in Northern Wisconsin around
the turn of the twentieth century. There were four brothers and three sisters
in the family. Mother and my Aunt Ellen moved to Naperville, Illinois in the
mid-1930s to teach grammar school there. Olga later taught English at North
Central College. She was an amazing woman, a Champion Masters Swimmer, a painter, and she wrote many
short stories and poems. She was a two-time cancer survivor. She was working on
a novel up until the time of her death at age 90.
She was and will always be a source
of inspiration for me. I learned about writing from her and I learned about the
importance of belief in oneself. I came across this collection of her poems
while looking through a box of old photographs recently, and decided it was
time to present them in book form. She had indicated on the typewritten
manuscripts which had been published and I attempted to track down the various
journals or magazines to determine copyright status but was largely unsuccessful.
I have acknowledged various publications herein but cannot accurately cite
them.
Some of the poems are deeply
personal, some witty, all of them lyrical. The rhythm and the flow of her
metaphor reveal her vast knowledge of literature and poetry. Allusion, alliteration,
and onomatopoeia were her forte. She could extract the miraculous from the
ordinary. Humor abounds in poems like “My Unholy Garden” and “The X-rated
Garden” (“unbuttoned Bachelor Buttons have no shame…”). She
addressed grief and loss in poems like “Larkspurs” and her cancer in “Second
Anniversary” and “The Kiss”. Her stance concerning women’s rights is obvious in
poems like “The Penalty” and “On Being Every Woman”.
I
hear her voice here, her deep emotions. Her voice takes me to realms I never
imagined existed, places hidden. I offer these, her life’s poetic work, for
those readers who value poets and poetry, for those who can find meaning in
metaphor and allegory. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a poem can
be worth a thousand pictures.
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