Jacqueline Kudler
Jacqueline Kudler
Jacqueline Kudler, a long-time resident of Sausalito, California, taught classes in memoir writing and literature at the College of Marin in Kentfield for many years before her death in 2024. Her poems have appeared in numerous poetry journals and anthologies. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sacred Precinct, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2003; her second, Easing into Dark, in 2012. A third collection, Ripenings, was published in 2024. A valued member of the poetry community in Marin County, she was awarded the Marin Arts Council Board Award in 2005 and the Marin Poetry Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
Sacred Precinct
“This book is life in itself. Here, a close self-regard; there, a wider regard of the world—each poem precise, often scalpel sharp, always keen in its music, always wise. . . . Sacred Precinct is a large book, every poem in it earned.” —Gerald Fleming
There are two Ripenings . . .
—Emily Dickinson
“In Ripenings, Jacqueline Kudler’s rich imagery and love of language celebrate the people and places that have inhabited her world. Nature commands a major presence, its bliss and blight: how it reaches out to us, offering a place for healing to occur. For Kudler, it’s in our time on earth that we experience infinity. Death is also here, in poems limning the long California drought or in lyrics addressed to now-dead long-time friends and family members. She writes, ‘What more can anyone ask but / that Death, the ever-dependable / friend, will know I’m ready before / I do, will steal into my room while / I’m deep in dreams and lay his / glacial gift at my feet, so gentle, so / tender, that I’ll never wake at all.’
These poems are brilliantly alive!”
—Lily Iona MacKenzie, author of California Dreaming