Kelle Groom, a well-known poet in South Florida did a reading on Thursday, Oct 5 in Reeves Theater, as a part of the Writers at the University Series sponsored by the English and Writing Department.

Groom, a native of Florida has published two collections of poems, her first, Underwater City in 2004, and now “Luckily” in 2006. Her poems were also features in publications such as The New Yorker and the Texas Observer as well as many other magazines and journals. Groom was also taught writing at the University of Central Florida as well as Valencia Community College.

Coming on to the stage she started out with poems from her latest collection Luckily. She read poems like, “The Boy with His Mother Inside Him”, “Pool”, “Candid they Went” “Crush”, “At The Center for Grieving Children”, “Ode To My Toyota”, “This Life” and when asked to do an encore, she read “Not Sylvia Plath.” About 30 people were in attendance that night, each listening quietly to Grooms poems, her looking up at the end of each to give a shy smile and tell a bit about her poems and the collections.

She said that for Luckily she wanted to inject some sort of “luck” into each of the poems. She said she had a need to express loss, playfulness and even her politics.

Her poems are full of amazing imagery, as they form a picture in your mind and with her reading it is easy to come away with an appropriate understanding. Her poems often use some reference to the ocean. When asked about this, she said it was due to a childhood spent “on one coast or another.”

The audience, small as it might have been seemed to enjoy the reading, there was a hearty round of applause at the end of her reading with audience members asking questions about her imagery, and where the need to write poetry came from. Many enjoyed the reading included sophomore, Drew Bartlett, who said, “Her reading was really excellent; she included humor as well as the water theme in almost all her poems which made them very interesting to listen to.”