Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes is an American university professor, poet, memoirist, essayist, and novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth4 April 1940
CountryUnited States of America
summer fog years
Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.
sirens lure
Italy's siren call lures us more and more.
morning memories home
Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Madonna dei fusi.' You open, as in childhood, and--for a time--receive this world. There's visceral aspect, too--the huntress who is free. Free to go, free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth.
smart house looks
Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.
summer years may
May summer last a hundred years.
southern speech metaphor
I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.
landscape honey bread
The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.
layers
The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.
land car plot
If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.
discovery fields language
I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.