Poems on the Road to Love uses poetry to probe and try to understand the many passages that challenge us or help us in finding love during this journey of life. The first half of this book explores the stressful trials we may encounter on the journey, while the second half looks at how we can get up off of the floor to heal and live what we’ve learned about love. There are many challenges in the journey, including Illusions, Self-Deception, Emotional Arousal, Animal Nature, Male & Female Bondage, Social Power, Sadness, Anger and Regression. The hardest challenge most of us face is failure, and these poems explore failure in many of its forms, looking for clues about its mysteries. Failure poems include Parent-Child Burdens, Layers of Grief, Cruelty, Poverty, Racial Division and Disappearing Women. Each poem tries to show how we have given up on each other and explores how to redeem ourselves.The poems in the second half look into the simple things that help us recover and move on to find love, such as Solitude, Friends, Forgiveness, A Little Wisdom and Balance. The final chapters examine the work of a good life, with poems like Family Love Patterns, Compassion, Gratitude, Kindness, Beauty and Presence. Once we discover this work, our lives can glow and become healthier with our best intentions. If we’re lucky, we’ll figure out how to make love’s Magic in the process, so we can support each other in loving ways.
Love Catalogue, book 1, Love Catalogue, book 2 and Poems on the Road to Love, are three books of poems that explore love from a psychological perspective. They were written by JV Connors (aka Joanie), a licensed psychologist who combined her academic knowledge about relationships with the wisdom she learned from therapy clients, distilling their courageous struggles and triumphs into verses that explore the many ways that love shapes our lives.
Connors began writing poetry 20 years ago to help a friend in crisis, then discovered that poetry enabled her to bring together all the perspectives of her life work – psychotherapist, systems scholar, nature lover, Buddhist and friend – towards understanding love’s journey. She hopes these books encourage readers to pursue the guidance that love provides to troubles, or even see that love really is the answer.
She earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri at Columbia and taught classes in counseling, peace studies, psychology and sociology for 20 years as an adjunct faculty at four universities. She has written numerous articles for publications such as the Journal of Group Counseling, Desert Exposure, and the Northwest Earth Institute (these can be found here). She also co edited the book, Teaching Peace through Popular Culture.
Current writing projects include completing a play for the Silver City Community Theatre (Poker Queens of Silver City) and a biography about her father (E. Bruce Connors in War, Love, Work & Life). In addition, she is nurturing a new flock of poems towards compiling Love Catalogue, book 3.
Connors lives in the foothills of the Gila National Forest near Silver City with two cats and a dog. She is a steering committee member for the Silver City branch of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness and previously volunteered for peace, human rights, trauma remediation, and animal welfare causes, along with serving as a peace witness in Central America for seven summers.
