Thank you, Stuart and Árni. I hope you enjoy the book (hopefully you will
not find it too strange or disturbed or violent). I appreciate your
favorable words about the poems in the B. Guest APR issue, Stuart, and
yours Árni about the Scandinavian last name: the last name rhymes with
Pudding. A "Gudding" is a small vigorous seabird that flickers around the
cliffs of fjords (really), but it also means "person of God." My ancestors,
the Syversons and the Guddings, sailed from Trondheim in the late 1860s and
settled in Ulen and Flom and Fergus Falls, Minnesota. The Guddings were and
are shipwrights in Trondheim. People from Ulen and Flom still speak with
the tonal and accentual patterns of Norwegian. My uncle Gerald (with a hard
"g") has a wheat farm outside Flom. The poem "The Pallbearer Races" is a
plain-jane narrative tribute to a practice our family's engaged in for
about 90 years. GG
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