Sing One Song

About the Book

When Clara Rising left Academe to re-erect four pre-Civil War log cabins on an abandoned farm in Kentucky, she and her husband found themselves in a world of creeks and hills saturated with history and a solitude so emotionally rewarding that the pioneers and Indians who had lived there seemed to speak again through bluebirds and fireflies. They found, too, the generosity of neighbors whose ancestors had crossed the mountains with Boone, and whose almost childlike reverence for learning was in direct conflict with many of the next generation, stubbornly independent from anything remotely related to heritage.

But there was a heritage, a glue that cemented the people together with all the tenacity of a sacred cult--the horse. In a Kentucky stable all distinctions disappear. So there was no surprise when an alcoholic ex-jockey tried to give away a thoroughbred stallion of questionable origin. Was he trying to hide on one of those hill farms Shergar, the "Irish Secretariat" stolen from the Aga Khan's stud farm near Dublin? And return him to his owner by jumping the fence at Belmont? We can only listen as the sounds of "The Sidewalks of New York" waft over the crowds, and wait for the gates to swing open.

About the Author

Mother of four, grandmother of six, Army wife, ex-professor of humanities, Clara Rising, Ph.D., sold in 1986 without an agent to the first publisher to see it a long manuscript which became the Civil War novel IN THE SEASON OF THE WILD ROSE. Since then four more books, ranging from ancient Greece to the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor, have confirmed her belief that only through the insights of inspiration can the facts of history rescue us from a despair which too often accompanies reality. In the poems of THAT INWARD EYE Rising reaffirms her no-nonsense commitment to a cultural inheritance she considers essential for survival in the 21st century. A large part of that inheritance is an unabashed passion for Nature and for animals--perhaps our ultimate salvation in an increasingly crazy world. Now 81 and a great-grandmother, she lives and rides her horse in the countryside near Lexington, Kentucky.