Walking Each Other Home, Gail Rudd Entrekin’s sixth book of poems, is brave and unflinching as this accomplished poet accompanies her husband, traveling the terrain of terminal illness. No one who turned away, even for a moment, from the reality of suffering, could write these poems of love. She has instead embraced the suffering and the man and these resulting poems are ones of deep compassion and insights that surprise — not a cliché or dollop of sentimentality to be found.
Entrekin is one of the few poets who can write a spare line that moves as easily as water over polished rock to arrive like a sudden bloom of mountain lupine. And not just for the glory of it, but to ground us deeply in the rocky alpine soil of her journey.
It is the depth of this couple’s love that created this book, the willingness to go into and with their allotment of sorrow, rather than trying to escape it. It has touched the soft places in me which I did not know needed touching again until I read this wonderous book. It works as strongly for poetry lovers as for those contemplating or experiencing end-of-life issues, or indeed for anyone who needs its steadying faith in Life.
D. James Smith (Café Dissertation)
Gail is a poet, editor, publisher, teacher, quilt maker and hiker. Books of her poems include John Danced (1988), You Notice the Body (1998), Change (Will Do You Good) (2005), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award, and Rearrangement of the Invisible, (2012), and The Art of Healing, written with her husband, Charles Entrekin, 2016. Her newest collection is Walking Each Other Home, 2023.