Low Country, High Water

“Salley Stewart Mohney is a keen observer of estuary and ocean, landscape and flower, birds and weather. She translates her landscapes, waterscapes, and interiors (‘Her Mother’s Kitchen’ being one of the gems) into connections with family, loss, and beauty, creating small, delicate patterns that intrigue and charm. A child’s going away, a father’s jigsaw sky, a mother’s loss to Parkinson’s, and the wide world in which all things live—here is the physical and the spiritual at once, touchable and fine.”
—Betty Adcock
 

“Sally Stewart Mohney takes us into a world of remarkable beauty and threatening terrain. Her weather is indeed unsettled whether the locale is coastal Carolina storms—detritus flies past: / hair, wind, sock / bits of tainted bitten heart—to the river Seine where she scatters ashes from a Paris footbridge. Mohney’s water, marshes to ocean, carry us to the natural world and all its inhabitants in lyrical and scenic ways. Family stories flow and ebb as does Mohney’s own deeply felt and beautifully told story. Digging in her garden, she finds her son’s old toys—my shoulders folded like napkins, / knees baptized. Her delicate lines fall like snow in winter, the silence in just the right spaces, the subtle, soft build of each poem until we are swept along, so completely, we forget ourselves, the magical place where every reader hopes to dwell.”
—Diana Pickney