Highly-Rated Book

Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter

Unable to conceive a child, Siegel and Solonche adopted an abandoned Chinese baby and, both nearing 50, embarked on parentage. Each fills half this book with poems reacting to and meditating on their experience. Both focus intensely on the being and doings of Emily, their peach girl. Siegel sees China and all nature in the child, generally and particularly; one of her finest poems, "To the Chinese Mothers," conjures the emotions of all the Chinese mothers who have had to give up their children as well as of the one mother who had to give up this baby girl. Solonche characteristically wraps himself in the moments of Emily's and his interactions, often repeating a phrase within a poem as if it were a refrain in the song of fatherhood; when he looks beyond the present, it is the future rather than, like Siegel, the past that he envisions. Thanks to their poetic skill and emotional wisdom, Siegel and Solonche create not treacly inspiration but a testament of love and faith in humanity.