Shirley’s poems are delightful portraits of our rural world. Farms, local people, cheese, parades, laundry, and Santa Claus each take their turn jostling our memories and making us smile. Always appropriate, sometimes irrelevant, occasionally sentimental, and every so often political, locals will nod knowingly at Shirley’s inside jokes, and those from farther afield will receive a glimpse of a quickly disappearing world where community and animals play a major role in everyday life.

Besides portraying our local personality, these poems reflect some of Shirley’s accomplishments… she hand-sculpts the pottery mouse whistles that she presents to the winners of the James McIntyre Poetry Contests’ Cheese Poet Laureate awards; her passion for local history led her to be the first curator of the Ingersoll Cheese Museum and a member of the Ingersoll & District Historical Society; and believe it or not, she lives on a dairy farm with horses.

These poems are more than a poet’s pleasure; they are a reader’s pleasure as well.

Written by Shirley Lovell