About the Author

In her youth, Lily Iona MacKenzie, a poet and novelist who also writes nonfiction, frolicked on a Canadian farm in an area almost too small to be on the map. She didn't practice writing then, but she did learn to pay attention to her surroundings. The clouds in the sky offered images that stirred her imagination and stimulated her dreaming self. Cows, calves, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, dogs, cats, and horses were her early teachers and her main playmates. Those years instilled in her the need to honor those in her care and the realization that being successful involves hard work. As a writer, it includes her dedication to the writing craft and her belief that commitment and perseverance form the machinery that writers depend upon.

Reviews

"Listen closely to these poems' quiet but insistent murmur. Lily Iona Mackenzie meditates on the textures of her California neighborhood as well as distant lands-Italy, Spain, Russia, Mali. Her poems lovingly embrace jazz, classical music, four paintings by Matisse, a grandfather's voice, a 3-year-old niece. With concision and lucidity, she writes of birdnests destroyed by cutting nearby trees and how 'Age cuts into us, ' and she 'leans on form and shape/ to arrive at an understanding of' desire, anxiety, time, the mysteries beneath the sea and, really, everywhere. Each poem offers surprising images and perceptions, and collectively they answer 'The Artist's Call'-to 'capture these/ fleeting days/ on earth.' What a gorgeous book!" -Kathleen McClung, author of Temporary Kin and A Juror Must Fold in on Herself
"What is art, and what happens to us when we see or make it? These questions animate Lily Iona MacKenzie's California Dreaming. From ancient Egyptian artefacts to Richard Serra's sculpture, from martial music on Red Square to Dvorak and Copeland via a scenic route that takes us on a multi-part journey through Matisse, MacKenzie shows us what she numbers among poetry's true aesthetes. Even travel and family come to her first as forms of beauty. Beauty, though, never fully shelters us from a world of moral urgencies-injustice and violence hover just on the edges of these poems, reminding us that our sense of the beautiful is both fragile and essential." -Robert Archambeau, author of Alice B. Toklas is Missing, Laureates and Heretics, Poetry and Uselessness, The Poet Resigns, and Inventions of a Barbarous Age