Overview

Ambrosia: Love Poems chronicles one man's devotion to his wife over the course of decades of marriage, children, birthdays, stories, tests, promises, foibles, delights, treks, and sacraments. In poems effusive and spare, sacred and mundane, formal and free, this collection does what the poet Richard Hugo once suggested poetry should do: run the risk of sentimentality without becoming overly sentimental. These poems devote themselves to that line of feeling, knowing when to veer away from it, when to hold it in check, and when to explore it in every way.

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Reviews

"Mark Bennion writes a tribute to his wife, Kristine. Along the trail of his words, it isn't long until The Song of Solomon comes to mind. ""Come my beloved, let us go forth into the fields""-SS 7:11. But Bennion's words are from a contemporary world. Finding her was ""better / than a sideline pick-six / in the last two minutes of a title game."" Ambrosia is full of life and humor and travel to places with descriptive names-Great Falls, Cut Bank, Deer Lodge-and much fun and the importance of responsibility and the relief that such a life was found. Just listen to these words from the title poem-""But today I saw it, / raw and untutored, / purling and unrushed, // like the river steady / in its waves and offerings-"" Yes, Bennion's work cuts through the riverbanks with the steady life-stream of family and faith.-Diane Glancy, Author of Island of the Innocent, a Consideration of the Book of Job, & Psalm to Whom(e) . ""How can a poet write another love poem, much less a set of poems that chronicles love across decades? Mark Bennion's answer is to give readers high-resolution moments from his journey with his wife-rafting, holding hands, reading to one another, massaging a charley horse in the night. In these poems we glimpse the complexity, confusion, and wonder of mutual love and commitment, each poem reminding us that love is stronger than death.""-Nathaniel Lee Hansen, Editor of The Windhover"

Author Information

Mark D. Bennion grew up in Wisconsin, Utah, and Idaho. In his undergraduate days, he studied at Ricks College and Brigham Young University, majoring in English and minoring in Korean. Upon graduating from BYU, he lived in Jerusalem for a year and studied language and literature at Hebrew University. After his time in the Holy Land, he attended the MFA program at the University of Montana and finished there in 2000. Since then, he has taught composition, creative writing, and literature courses at BYU-Idaho. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Association for Mormon Letters award in poetry, he is the author of three previous poetry collections: Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through The Book of Mormon (2009, Bentley Enterprises), Forsythia (2013, Aldrich Press), and Beneath the Falls: poems (2021, Resource Publications). Mark and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of four daughters and one son.

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