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[|Image From Creative Commons] ||> ==Bio==
 * ==Colleen McElroy ==

Colleen McElroy was born in St. Luis, Missouri. She lived there until her parents divorced in 1938, then she moved in with her grandmother with her mom. Her mother soon remarried to army sergent Jesse Dalton Johnson. Along with moving around alot because her stepfather was in the army, colleen atteneded many colleges in different parts of the word. First, she attended a college in Germany, then transfered to Kansas City and recieved her B.A. Third, she studied hearing and speech at the University of Pittsburg, then returned again to Kansas City and did work with language patterns. Soon after this, she was married and divorced. Colleen went on to Washington State where she became the director of speech and hearing services, recieved her Ph.D in ethnolinguistic patternsof dialect differences and oral tradition, and became an English proffesor.

Colleen McElroy was a very succesful woman. In her thirties, McElroy discovered many black poets and their work such as Langston Hughes and Anne Spencer. Her first poems were collected in the 1973 cahpbook //The Mules Done Long Since Gone// and were inspired by the Pacific Northeast landscape. In 1979, she published another book inspired by landscape, but it was based on the suffering she went through with her first second divorce. In 1983 she was promoted to be the first black woman ever to be a full profesor at the University of Washington. McElroy's poem Queen of the Ebony Isles recieved the American Book Award in 1985. Colleen went on to publish two short story collections and two poetic memoirs that same year. Her most famous attribution is her What Madness Brought Me Here; a collection of her poems from 1968-1988.And through out all of Collen's hard work, she also wrote several television scripts. ||

Poetry links
[|Red Shoes from Wikimedia Commons] ||
 * * [|Moon Over Marakesh]
 * [|Bad Slam on Broadway]
 * [|Earth Kitt Takes the Old Woman Shopping for Red Shoes]
 * [|Codex: Frostbite]
 * [|Mother's Love] ||> [[image:red_shoes.jpg width="175" height="133"]]

Explication
Explication of "Mother Love" by Colleen J. McElroy: [|Mother's Love]

The two conflicts in the poem "Mother's Lover" by Colleen J. McElroy are man verse man and man verse self. The speaker of the poem is the mother of a girl. She does not speak outloud, but thinks in her head. The mother is kind and patient because by sitting quietly until her daughter arrives instead to complaining to the shrink about her crazy daughter. In the poem, the mother explains how even if your child no longer shows they love you, doesn't run on time for important things, and acts crazy, you are still supposed to show them patience and kidness. McElroy directs this poem towards women who are mothers. The speaker feels compelled to speak because she is confused and wants to say something on behalf of her daughter. Even though her daughter is crazy enough to do things like preach in public so that she is compelled to see a shrink, the mother is glad her daughter is not like the man in the middle of the park changing fro the whole world to see. Her motivation to think this is she wants to keep herself occupied while she sits and waits. The two other characters in the poem are the shrink and the man in the park. In "Mother's Love" a woman waits silently with her shrink until her daughter, who is running late, arrives. The climax in the poem is when the woman sees a man changing in a public park. This confuses her becasue she does not know why he deos so. The poem seems to take place in the early morning because the public park is empty, and the man changing is in his sleeping bag. Imagery is used in lines 1, 7, 8, 11, 18, 19, and 25 to explain what the park looks like, the man in the park, the speaker's daughter, and where the speaker is. Colleen McElroy uses enjambment in lines 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, and 24 to emphacize specific details in the setting and the thoughts of the woman. Repitition is used to say my daughter, park, public, and green multiple times to show the woman is thinking about other things, but in the back of her mind is still concentrated on her daughter. The poem has five stanzas, where the first four use enjambment to lead into the next stanza. Each stanza has five lines.