Exploring This Terrain: Poems

Margaret B. Ingraham's collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to "taste and see" - and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives.

"What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the 'secret places of my brokenness.' It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith." --Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming.


About the Author
Margaret B. Ingraham, a poet and photographer, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and "grew up" exploring the woods behind her childhood home. She is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry, and of This Holy Alphabet (Paraclete Press), lyric poems adapted from her own translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119. Ingraham is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, a Sam Ragan Prize and numerous residential Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has twice collaborated with composer Gary Davison, most notably to create "Shadow Tides," a choral symphony commissioned to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and performed on that date in Washington, DC. Ingraham lives in Alexandria, VA.