Praise for Skirmishes on the Okie-Irish Border

Dear Reader,
Please open this volume and turn to a poem called “Made Up.” I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never read anything quite like it, by turns hysterical and heartbreaking, like the whole book. The poems of Maureen Oehler DuRant arrive like good news, like the first earthy smells of spring in an Oklahoma meadow. Hers is a voice that delights and gratifies at every turn.

—George Bilgere, author of Imperial

Maureen DuRant’s Skirmishes on the Okie-Irish Border is both clear-eyed and open-hearted in its explorations of childhood, family, love, and those borders that both divide and define us. Humorous, candid, tender, they demonstrate a rare insight, engaging the world with plainspoken language and a canny wisdom. DuRant’s poems skirmish at the fraught edges of language, winning ground page by page “in a battle to claim turf where tongues can hold their own.”

—Morri Creech, author of Blue Rooms and The Sleep of Reason, Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Maureen Oehler DuRant invites her readers into this delightful collection with the short, thought-provoking poem “’Tis a Silly Place.” This lovely, smart poem, in an indirect way, opens the door—or battleground—with a simile that shines a light on the world of nature with its own infamous bent toward paradox and adversary. Very smart, too, to close the collection with a poem that betrays its author as a poet who, in the end, loves, though flawed it may be, this silly place. Anyone who enters this masterfully crafted, insightful, often hilarious book of skirmishes is sure to leave its pages not only enlightened but victorious.

—Cathy Smith Bowers, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2010-2012