East Aurora Advertiser

EAHS ’62 Alumna Carol Booth Jennings Publishes Second Volume of Poetry



In her poignant poem, “House Between Willow and Maple,” from her collection The Sustain Pedal, former East Aurora resident Carol Booth Jennings speaks of her last visit to 326 Girard Avenue, where she grew up in the 1940s, ’50s and ‘60s., in 2005. After her mother died, she cleaned out the house and reminisced about her childhood. “The house flows through me,/as I float from room to room,” she wrote, remembering, bemoaning, and, at last, conceding its inevitable loss to the next occupants.

The house will sell quickly.

New owners will rip off the wallpaper,

build rooms reaching into the back yard.

Her spirit will no longer be welcome.

And I will not visit again. 

Her latest collection, The Sustain Pedal (2022), and her first volume, The Dead Spirits at the Piano (2016), both from Cherry Grove Collections, Inc., feature poet Jennings, a retired government attorney now living in Washington, D.C., ranging far and wide with exquisite musings. Composers, poets, lovers, artists, exotic locations across the globe and a deep plundering of emotional treasure mingle with the mundane. But she often comes back home.

“Sacraments,” from The Sustain Pedal, has her remembering: 

Baptized Presbyterian,

I wished to be Catholic.

At seven, I stood on tiptoe

peered into the window

of Immaculate Conception

to see my other self

twirl amber rosary beads.

The poetry books by Carol Booth Jennings include The Sustain Pedal and The Dead Spirits at the Piano.

One poem in particular recalls a tragic moment of Jennings’ youth in East Aurora. On Wednesday, March 8, 1950, Cornelius George, a village employee, was swept down Tannery Brook at the Maple Road bridge while attempting to break up an ice jam. Despite rescue efforts involving over 100 volunteers in the village, fire and police companies at home and downstream on Cazenovia Creek and the Coast Guard, his body was never recovered. 

In “Ice Jam” from The Sustain Pedal, Jennings writes about her friend Judy Keller Morganti, still a village resident, who had spoken to Mr. George not long before the swollen brook and careening ice carried him to his death. He explained his task, Morganti told her friend, “then asked her name and she asked his,” only to discover in talking to her mother that, 

the man who had asked her name and told her his

was swept away in a sudden surge of water

and had not yet been found.

He was never found.

 

I do not miss the memory that could appear

in my winter dreams—his smile and asking my name. 

There is so much more, as I’ve said, to Carol Booth Jennings’ poetry than the local content; each entry gives us a clue to the woman behind it. Nevertheless, I was able to speak to her last week to give readers a better impression of her. As Carol Booth, she attended Main Street Elementary until Parkdale Elementary opened in the early ‘50s. She graduated from the original high school on Main Street in 1962, having reaped the benefits of English classes by Mrs. McNeil and Miss Harp, for whom she wrote a long paper on John Keats. 

Her father, James, ran Booth’s Pharmacy at the corner of Hamlin and Main (later Nuwer’s Florist, now Aurora Cider House), where she worked after school. Her mother played piano. 

“Music was important in our family. We had a baby grand piano that they bought in the 1930s.  My father played the cello. We often had live classical music at home. I did not realize how unusual that was; it was normal for us. I went to the Buffalo Philharmonic and Chautauqua Institution to hear symphonies. I took piano lessons from George Kelver and developed a love of classical music that continues. When my mother died in 2005, I had [East Aurora master piano craftsman] Bob Sowyrda totally refurbish the piano and deliver it to Washington. He’s a wonderful man.

“I remember that everyone in town was Republican, my parents and their friends. In sixth grade, there was an election between Eisenhower and Stevenson and we all cast our votes in class; Stevenson didn’t get many.” She remembers the whiteness of the town in the 1950s and the trouble her minister, Rev. B. Gibson Lewis of First Presbyterian, encountered when he dared to criticize racism in his sermons and actions. I think all those are changing now; I have veered away from that conservatism.”

She loved her time growing up and comes back for all the reunions, but she says, “I knew I wouldn’t stay here after high school. I was attracted to big cities.” 

From “The Druggist’s Daughter” (The Dead Spirits): 

When business is slow,

I take out a book, Salinger

or Fitzgerald, though Father

disapproves my reading of fiction

in full view of any customer

walking through the door,

suggests I dust shelves instead.

From “Aurora” (The Dead Spirits)

Later she walks down Willow Street

to her grandmother’s house,

huddles on the front steps,

talks in low tones about leaving this town,

as the old woman folds her arms,

nods, half smiles, and fireflies blink

the onset of dark.

She earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from New York University and settled in New York City. Eventually, she moved to the capital where she advocated for consumers as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau. With such a busy life, she still gathered thoughts from so many facets of history and life that her tables of contents read like an encyclopedia. A few titles from The Dead Spirits: “In Rome with John Keats,” “Playing Debussy” and “The Train from Guangzhou to Beijing (1979).” From The Sustain Pedal: “Conversation With Beethoven,” “Norwegian Epitaph,” “Pompeii” and “Russian Dream.” 

Now retired, she and her husband travel and follow Washington politics. She is once again taking piano lessons and re-connecting with the composers that inhabit her poems. She’s been writing poetry most of her life, but was able to concentrate her efforts in retirement and publish the two volumes, which contain more than 50 poems each. She’ll give a reading at Chautauqua Institution this summer as she has for several years. She’s excited to return in July for her 60th high school reunion.

And, as Reunion Weekend approaches, it might be best to end with a few lines from Dead Spirits’ “Class Reunion.”

From the edge of my eye

I think I glimpse you,

then hear your voice

cut the crowd behind me;

some time this night

your dark stare

will trap me again.

I delay the moment

as long as I can,

though when it happens

I am no less surprised.

 

We stand close,

do not touch. 

If you could will everyone else

to disappear right now, would you?

you ask, and I whisper yes.

You were the first for me,

and that love has no past tense.

As always with you,

I dance with the devil. 

Find Carol Booth Jennings’ poetry at The Bookworm in East Aurora or at carol-jennings.com, www.cherry-grove.com and amazon.com.

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