Mia Schilling Grogan is an associate professor of English at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She is a medievalist who works in the areas of hagiography and women’s spiritual writing. Her poems have appeared in various journals over many years. Her first full-length collection, Mid-Flight Birder, is available now from Kelsay Books or wherever books are sold.
The titular poem in Mid-flight Birder, observes of “mere starlings” that in a murmuration, each one plays a necessary part, as “felt watchfulness orders / their art, hurls them heavenwards together.” Such watchfulness from within the flight and the belief that heading heavenward requires relationship and community characterize Mia Schilling Grogan’s work over the decades of practice this volume represents. Carefully crafted poems sweep forward and bank back again as the poet launches into and then revisits her life and the variety of roles both personal and professional she has played. Throughout the collection, the sure presence and insistent questions of faith inform the poet’s worldview, yielding meditations on the ways that prayer, ritual, and compassion might order the art of our ordinary lives, until, as the volume concludes, “everyone gets home.”
At the heart of Mia Schilling Grogan’s musical, nuanced, and carefully wrought poetry is a deep longing for a voice outside the self. While translating the words of the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Grogan finds herself dissatisfied with rendering mere language on the page and the images of nature. “Gabriela, it is not enough,” she writes in a poem. “I want to hear you.” At the same time, this poet seeks, and often finds, a powerful spirituality in everyday life—during a ride on a commuter train, for example, a concert in a park, or a long lunch in the kitchen with a friend. In poem after poem in this radiant book, Mia Schilling Grogan reveals “the beauty always lurking in the common of our days.”
—David M. Katz, author, The Biographer (Dos Madres Press)
Mia Grogan’s beautifully crafted Mid-Flight Birder brims full of watchfulness and mystery. As she puts it, “[W]hen we bless the bread / and wine, we are at table in an upper / room.” Our parents, long gone, still hold us close. Song and fear, wrapped in memory, connect past and present. Called “to unknot it all,” the poet examines her overlapping roles of teacher, scholar, parent, daughter, sibling, and spouse across decades—observing wryly in retrospect that she has often been drawn to “[think] about birds / and faith.” She declares what we seek most is “the circle that contains / everyone, lost and found.” In this way, these poems gift us prayer, “tender care” and an “abundance of solace, / bread and love.”
—Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing)