A Special Education presents twenty poems that navigate the parallel journeys of artistic pursuit and parenting a child with profound autism. Meredith Bergmann, an accomplished sculptor whose work stands in Central Park and throughout Boston, brings the same attention to detail and emotion to these poems as she does to her public monuments.
The collection moves from preserving fragments of her son's early speech in "Nursery Rhyme" to the transformative moment in "Lesson," when he learns to communicate by pointing to letters at age twelve. Yet as "Homecoming" reminds us, "After the miracle the car needs gas"—life continues with its demands even as everything has changed.
Throughout, Bergmann weaves together themes of art, memory, and the struggle to bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides. Her background as a visual artist informs her exploration of how we learn to see, shape, and ultimately understand one another.
Praise for A Special Education:
"Meredith Bergmann’s first collection of poems offers us a special education indeed: out of the losses and silences of the personal and historic past, she summons speech, and from it creates poems of enduring (my prophecy here) artfulness. The lesson her little book offers is nothing less than what the good life is and how it may be lived." - Charles Martin
