Enid Osborn’s new poetry collection, Pedregosa St., is a special volume of poetry which spans 28 years of living in a hundred-year old Victorian house. Osborn served as the city’s poet laureate from 2017-2019. Her latest book is a delight for anyone who has ever been to Santa Barbara or dreamt of living here. Pedregosa St. makes the reader appreciate the cast of characters who inhabit the house, neighborhood, and town. Osborn’s haunting words compel the reader to relish and revisit each poem again and again. The book is divided in six sections: Cul-de-sac, Jon, Birds, Ghosts, Heaven, and Awake. I had the pleasure of speaking to Enid and asking her some questions about her book. She also shares two poems from the Awake section of her book.
Are there particular poems that were harder to write?
The poems in the section titled “Heaven” were some of the hardest to write, dealing, as they do, with mortality. For instance, “Paradise” was hard to write because it speaks a bitter truth. At the point where one is facing life and death choices, one may choose a different path and a different set of people to hang around with. It can bring about freedom from old ways.