Solomon in all his wisdom recognized that there is a time for everything - "a time to laugh, a time to mourn". Rebecca Stallard in her poetry collection And the Birds are Singing recognizes that her strength flows from her family's determination to laugh when there is every reason to mourn. Rebecca's poetry hauntingly captures the devastation of cancer, and will evoke a lump in the throat and an ache in the heart, but most of all it will remind readers that it is always possible to sing.

Mary Martin
English Professor
University of Missouri, Kansas City

And the Birds are Singing introduces you to a family that we all have known, or will know in time, because cancer keeps us company even in a world with tremendous medical advances. Poet, Rebecca Stallard, eloquently voices the maternal longings of her grandmother, Esther Bird, in such a way that the reader steadily walks the roads of Barnes, Kansas and intimately encounters the hopes, dreams and fears of her eleven children facing the great unknown of hereditary cancer. The poetic-narrative of Esther's voice keeps moving us forward to a wide open place of health and healing where birds do fly.

Susan Carol Davis
Los Angeles Actress
and Consulting Producer

A story written with love and straight from the heart. It reminds me of the steps we take to control, to some degree, our own destiny.

Bernita Pettit
34 year cancer survivor

An extraordinary work of ancestry and poetic style.

Michael Wells
Poet, and
Editor, Rogue Poetry Review