Jane M. Newby

The Bulgarian translator (and fellow poet) of the author's first book of poetry, "A Thief of Roses," described it as "a kind of poetic diary" with "the Muse accompanying her incessantly" and "numerous" sources of inspiration, including "the richness and versatility of nature, where she feels at home." Her love poems are "extremely laconic." "She prefers the temptation of the unknown roads and discovery to the comfort of life. Her inner insight follows her dreams beyond the frontier..." "Charms and inner dynamism," "philosophical depth," and a "sound sense of humor" are "so characteristic of her works." "From Windows and other poems" continues this diary and diversity, is thoughtful, lyrical, pointed, humorous, with formal rhymes to Ferlenghettiesque scrawls, new "love that has failed me again" as "you become just another echo in the featureless night" poems, along with homage to a marriage of adventurous "kindred spirits" that is "never smooth but always moving ahead." She recounts a life with birds-birds that awaken, lure, enchant, mystify, portend, hide, leave. White ducks doomed to be pressed for holidays. Starlings flapping "wings like weapons." "Birds lost again to the lovely, peaceful sky," "sometimes too distant to be known." She is "at home in" icy fields and marshes in fall when "thistles toughen," comes to know bats soaring "in silence and in grace," pack rats who "don't have to settle for less," and windflowers "no promises can hold no traps ensnare." In northern wintry blue moments she can see "for an instant, the heart of everything." She writes of dreams she "reluctantly" has "to shed," struggles with "not getting every dream I've ever had," "dreams straying through sleep now and then and leaving me restless," daydreams that can be "tedious" or "vanish in wrangling, illusions, uncertainty" or maybe are not even possible "in worlds so self-contained." The "dreamspace rising foreign and faintly amid unknown edges and singular views" nourishes and inspires her; and although she doesn't "need any other world than this" and doesn't know "what all this ferment and foment will come too, finally," she still will dream "because the wind unfelt behind windows blows yet and there is enough mystery to keep me looking out..." It's "the dreams that keep me going."

Cruising Highways into Cuba, back to the Balkans, and through Sri Lanka are accounts of the author's travels to three very different, fascinating, and seldom-visited places in the world. Down highways and through villages, cities, and countryside, she explores the history, architecture, music, art, and food of sensuous, lively Cuba (and its troubled relations with America); and Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Romania, their people, history, customs (and complicated relations with each other) and through the resplendent island of Sri Lanka, with the "nicest" people in the world still at odds with each other.

Wanting to reside somewhere in Eastern Europe for a while, curious to learn how that region was faring after the fall of the wall, the author and her husband taught at the American College of Sofia from 1998 to 2000 in Sofia, Bulgaria, the oldest active American high school outside of the United States, founded in 1860, closed during the fifty years of Communist rule, and reopened in 1991. "Blagodaria, Bulgaria" is the account of their intense, challenging, poignant two years living in a villa with other teachers in a wacky, unique school that shared its campus with a police training academy and never knew when it was going to be ordered to close down, and in a wacky, closed country struggling with the residue of Communism--corruption, poverty, work ethic, unplowed streets, among a people known for pessimism but who had a turbulent history and an uncertain future. Their remarkable, endearing students, some of the brightest in the country and learning to learn by critical thinking rather than rote memorization, have dreams of a different life, many of them going on to prestigious American universities. Despite the all-encompassing demands of the school, the author manages to explore the cultural and historical delights in the old city and travel around the beautiful, diverse countryside of dry plains, rugged mountain ranges, Black Sea coast, villages and vineyards. One summer is spent backpacking through more countries of Eastern Europe, with their accompanying transitions, and during school breaks there are trips to the Mideast and South Africa. Fifteen years after leaving it, the author returned to Bulgaria, which was still in ferment but opening up to the rest of the world and much changed.

It is 1970 and Bree, a dreamer, is bummed that she is forced to live in a dormitory her sophomore year of college when she is so eager to meet "interesting" people and "taste" life. But as autumn's warmth and light slowly wane, it is through her relationships with the girls in the dorm, especially the black activist girl, Earledeen, and the confused boy, Clark, she meets in her Romantic Poetry class, she deepens her understanding of others and learns the world she seeks really was always there. This uneasy, unending grasping for something unknown and beyond the horizon is reflected in the other, wide-ranging stories included in the book. Stories about a girl who must decide how "dumb" she is going to be when she grows up and how children must choose what to honor and what to renounce when beginning a life different from their families; about one lawyer confronting the cruelty of the world in her first job and another discovering the world's indifference in a McDonald's. A middle-aged man tries to escape his stolid existence by joining a "new age" group and an old man wrestles with shadows. Resolute, with pain and revelation they carry and continue on.

An artist dreaming too much, a dancer forsaking the one thing she loves, a widow plottingto kidnap the boy she lost, a woman afraid pleasure's passed her by, a boy and the rat he can't save, the Renaissance man realizing his limits, a magician who can guarantee dreams but not happiness, a troubled teen's obsession with Paul McCartney, girls forced to grow up in ways they don't want. . . In these moving, well-crafted, and resonant stories, Jane M. Newby's characters struggle to learn the difference between possibilities and illusions, innocence and acceptance, believing and knowing, between dreaming life and living it.