Flowers of the Heavens

Description

Flowers of the Heavens

Poems by Joyce Compton Brown
ISBN: 978-1-963695-37-3 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-38-0 ebook $9.99

April 15, 2025

---

Flowers of the Heavens by Joyce Compton Brown explores the South and its history through the lens of her family. These poems recognize within this history the holiness of life and the nobility of the human spirit, while remaining conscious of the necessity of breaking up the South’s old and stubborn mores. The collection is an elegy to the past, an appreciation of present moments, and an acceptance of the finite in the flowing of time which carries us through Earth’s cycles and our own. Brown documents a life lived through awareness of those moments of wonder, large and small, a life lived in both sorrow and in joy.

---

Praise for Flowers of the Heavens by Joyce Compton Brown­

---

In Joyce Compton Brown’s new collection, Flowers of the Heavens, we are enriched and enthralled by her insightful, image-laden poems from and about the rural South. These poems avoid simple nostalgia by their careful attention to surprising detail and their willingness to look critically at the past and its legacy.

—Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree,
winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award

---

Joyce Compton Brown’s new poetry collection Flowers of the Heavens evokes memories without relying on sentimentality. Never nostalgic, consistently thoughtful, Brown’s work offers inviting considerations of how we decide what we hold on to.

—Thomas Alan Holmes, author of In the Backhoe’s Shadow

---

These poems are such a gift of resilience and wisdom, shining the absolute richest patina while sharing the most profound details of an observed life. This is a book of lullabies about tragedies. We are soothed and swaddled, but the truth “of raw survival” is the haunting melody.

—Susan O’Dell Underwood, author of Splinter and Genesis Road

---

Joyce Compton Brown is a poet of a particular place, people, time, and of a woman’s perspective. In Flowers of the Heavens, her poetic voice achieves its fullest, most fearless expression.

—Joan Barasovska, author of Orange Tulips

---

Joyce Compton Brown was born into an agrarian German/Scots-Irish farm family in Iredell County, North Carolina. Appalachian State University confirmed her love for the mountains and Appalachian music, where she took classes in the Child Ballads and other subjects under the founder of the Appalachian Studies Association, Cratis Williams, and acquired her first banjo. Between bouts of paper grading at Gardner-Webb University, she welcomed chances to learn at Berea College and Hindman Settlement School writing workshops. Her early writing focuses on her Southern family roots and stories she heard as a child. Later writing, though based in specificity, strives for a sense of universality. She is the author of four previous books of poetry, most recently Hard-Packet Clay.