The Novels and Poetry Of Elizabeth Cunningham
Elizabeth Cunningham, managing director of The Center at High Valley, is also an award-winning novelist and poet. Her two most recent novels The Passion of Mary Magdalen and Magdalen Rising are available (signed and at a discount!) at all High Valley events.
For more about The Maeve Chronicles, see the description and excerpts below. Visit Elizabeth’s website:
Elizabeth Cunningham
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Also available at High Valley is Elizabeth's latest collection of poetry, Wild Mercy; Tarot-Inspired Poems. See below two poems by Elizabeth Cunningham honoring Olga, High Valley’s Empress. Elizabeth Cunningham has won back the rights to her earlier titles: The Return of the Goddess; The Wild Mother; How to Spin Gold and Small Bird. The novels will eventually be reissued by Monkfish Book Publishing Company. Meanwhile all the titles, except for How to Spin Gold which has completely sold out, are available at High Valley events. Elizabeth's The Maeve Chronicles are a series of novels recounting the life adventures of an unconventional, unrepentant Mary Magdalen—a redheaded Celt named Maeve who is no one’s disciple! Each novel is designed to stand alone, and the series can be read in any sequence. Magdalen Rising, The Beginning by Elizabeth Cunningham (Monkfish Publishing, 2007) set at a druid college, tells the tale of Maeve’s youthful passion for a student from Galilee known to the Celts as Esus. The lovers are forced to part when Maeve defies the authority of the druids to save Jesus’s life. The Passion of Mary Magdalen by Elizabeth Cunningham (Monkfish, 2006) follows Maeve’s perilous search for Jesus through slavery and prostitution in Rome to founding her own holy whorehouse in Magdala. The ultimate reunion of Maeve and Jesus is as stormy as it is ecstatic, infusing this passion narrative with their passion for each other. In the end, they dare together the greatest mystery of all. Bright Dark Madonna, the third in Elizabeth's series, is forthcoming from Monkfish Publishing in Spring, 2009. Black-Robed Priestess, the fourth and concluding chronicle, is in progress. The following are excerpts from The Maeve Chronicles, the first two adapted as poetry: IT’S NOT ALL PRETTY from Elizabeth Cunningham's Magdalen Rising It’s not all pretty. The earth knows terrible things. She receives all deaths, gentle and brutal. She bears the pain of every birth. She turns all things back into herself; she worries the bones to dust.
She is changing, always changing. Layers shift. Her own bones crash and break.
Tides heave. Rock erupts into fire. It’s not all pretty.
Beauty never is.
WEDDING WINE from Elizabeth Cunningham's The Passion of Mary Magdalen I don’t know exactly what was in the wine. It tasted fiery and sweet. I suspect it was red mead: Maeve Rhuad Mead mixed with red wine. An intimate joke, a pun made by the Bridegroom that only the Bride would understand. Its effect transcended any ingredient. It was like drinking life itself: new-turned earth, sun, wind scented with sea, blossoms opening at first light, the ripe perfection of fruit— the elements gathered on our tongues, lingering on our breath. It was like drinking love itself, the passion of the Bride and Bridegroom distilled, shared among the guests, flowing in all our veins, rivers from a single rise. If we were drunk, we were divinely drunk. We were in love. In Love. All of us. None of us could bear to part that night. The stars were so beautiful. We were so beautiful. In the end, we all slept together, no one alone, each one beloved.
HYMN TO MA OF EPHESUS from Elizabeth Cunningham's forthcoming Bright Dark Madonna I sing to the mother of all she whose heart is honeycomb who follows the spiral flight of bees
I sing to the mother long bereft to the one who is leaving me for the far high reaches of light and air.
O mother of earth, crowned with creation think kindly on your daughter toiling here, heavy with sorrow and fruit.
O wild, sweet, terrible mother ancient and young, tended and tender dry and translucent to my touch
when you are gone, will you be my road? when you are gone, will you show me the stars? when you are gone, will I find your face in my own?
I sing to the mother who is more than mine to the girl grown ancient gathering eggs to her breast to the abandoned mother who has never left.
Two poems from Elizabeth Cunningham's Wild Mercy, inspired by Olga EMPRESS CARD The Queen of Life likes to wear leopard print sarongs garments easy to slip on and off.
That mirror you see is the moon fallen at her feet.
She never looks at herself from the outside. She loves her body more than that.
Does the sun feel good on her flank? Does the rock she leans against fit the curve of her back? Her beauty is made of ease.
Wherever she walks there’s a smell of beach roses and salt—sometimes a whiff of seaweed at low tide. It wasn’t that long ago she was a mermaid.
If you lay your head between her breasts you can hear the ocean.
AS SHE IS I cannot find my husband’s trowel to take to plant flowers on my mother’s grave, but I know my mother-in-law the gardener will have one. I stop by and find her trowel on an old picnic bench beside her clippers and gardening gloves but I can’t find her inside resting or out in the flower beds. I think of leaving a note in the kitchen then decide to walk once more around the house. At last I see her standing near the lake looking at the crabapple tree, blossom-heavy and intensely pink beside the brown barn. She stands still, and I see her as she is alone. The wind is bending the grass toward her, seeds and blossoms borne on it the water stirred in tiny waves the sky blue but soft with moisture.
She does not see or hear me till I call hello. “I was just thinking,” she says, “how much Julian would have enjoyed this tree. He planted it, you know.” Then she turns toward the peach tree that has given such a profusion of peaches in all the years I’ve known her. “I think it’s dead,” she says. I look, and it’s so bare and grey surrounded by all the pink and green and blue. “It is the last of the fruit trees Julian planted. Well,” she shrugs, “they don’t last that long.”
We talk of other things. She lets me take the trowel I promise to bring her a new plant. I am thinking I will never forget seeing her standing alone in the spring wind between the blossoming crabapple and the dead peach remembering her lover who planted fruit trees.
All poems by Elizabeth Cunningham.

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