Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania in 1947. Many of her poems are set in Pennsylvania farming regions and mill towns. She is the author of two poetry collections, Food for the Winter (Purdue) and Province of Fire (Iris Press), as well as a chapbook, The Red Room (Heatherstone Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. She has won two NEA fellowships in Creative Writing and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her poems have been included in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for American High School Students and Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework. One of her poems has been broadcast on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. She teaches each spring at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. She divides her time between Montana and Arizona.

Other poems by Geraldine Connolly in Verse Daily:
July 4, 2005:   "Mourner" "I love how you push aside the light's invasion..."
September 14, 2004:  "Regrets" "Out of their secret places..."

Books by Geraldine Connolly:

Other poems on the web by Geraldine Connolly:
"The Summer I Was Sixteen"
" In Praise of Dawn"
"To a Joshua Tree"
"In the Province of Fire"

Geraldine Connolly's Website.

About Hand of the Wind:

"Hand of the Wind will delight readers of poetry with a winning combination: an unbroken contact with the natural world and a flair for metaphoric inventiveness."
—Billy Collins

"Gerry Connolly’s poems inhabit landscapes that in turn inhabit her. The warmly knowing, often rapturous, always clear-eyed physical immediacy of her details can become portals of revelation. Here’s a poet with a genuine 'appetite for apparitions,' a consciousness acutely in touch with its natural and human surroundings, who can move easily between hard home truths, weird Elvis impersonators, and a mystical address to a Mourning Cloak, the mourner arriving in a 'mask/ with the face of a red-tailed hawk.' Hers is a world in which even 'wolves whisper/ in lyric babble' and 'All night long the scars sing their lonely songs.' Throughout Hand of the Wind we hear and see how 'new thoughts came alive, lit like window panes./ I began to record, slowly, what I saw.' As she says at the close of one of my favorite lyrics, 'Jonquils as Evangelists,' 'Let me change/ as they change, into something better.' It’s the sort of spell the best of these poems can work on their readers: like her description of Robert Johnson’s blues, they capture 'our yearning’s pure clear notes.'"
—Eamon Grennan