The Last Ceremony by Susan Deer Cloud
March 5, 2008
FootHills Publishing, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker
Native Daughter
A writer of Blackfoot, Mohawk, Seneca heritage (Métis), Susan Deer Cloud grew up in the Catskill Mountains, but, as indicated on the Winning Writers web site, “has sojourned in many places.” Along the way, Deer Cloud has accumulated many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Her bio on the NEA website reads, “her cat is not impressed by any of this.” It is hard not to be impressed, however, by Deer Cloud’s third book of poetry, The Last Ceremony.
In Native tradition, ceremony is central and healing. Deer Cloud laments the loss of tribal lands and traditions: “In what places might I do ceremony / … let fall sweet smelling tobacco to the ground / after the words are covered over with my sadness?” She mourns the diminished ceremonial life of her people: “I am not going to pretend. The only ceremony / we had left to us was taking rides in a dented / Chevy on dirt roads no city slickers could find. / The only ceremony left to us was stopping / at a path we mountain Indians knew about, / stepping behind one another, hands brushing / the bent ferns.”
Deer Cloud does not stand on ceremony: her language can be every bit as earthy as the landscape she inhabits. In one poem, the key word from a familiar phrase is changed from cojones to cunt. Deer Cloud unapologetically claims the power of the feminine, especially in the prize-winning poem “Welcome to the Land of Ma’am” (Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award, 2003). In contrast to the current cult of young and artificial women with “collagen-smiles, sucked-thin thighs,” Deer Cloud dreams of reclaiming a time, “when older women were revered as beautiful elders, medicine women, / wise women, beloved women, when the People cried for their visions / in the female heart of the ancient hills.”
In her author’s statement for the NEA, Deer Cloud says, “I am of Native heritage, and our approach to life is very much one that includes thanksgiving, gratitude.” Indeed, her poem “Why I Love Being an Indian” celebrates an impromptu cell phone call from her sister, who has seen a vision above their Indian grandfather’s house: “I love this about being Indian, having a sister call me like this / me stopping in my tracks under florescent lights in a grocery store, / grinning a giant of a smile as she tells me about a cloud warrior.”
Deer Cloud writes with the strength of a warrior, yet she also evinces a certain vulnerability. In one of the most moving passages, she asks: “What if you could love yourself enough / to learn your own language, dance / between earth and sky? / Or at least pretend to?” In The Last Ceremony Deer Cloud does more than pretend—she dances, beautifully and powerfully, with words.
Forms of Intercession by Jayne Pupek
March 5, 2008
Mayapple Press, 2008
Review by LouAnn Shepard Muhm
Paper Chariots of the Profane
In Jayne Pupek’s 2008 collection of poems, Forms of Intercession (Mayapple Press), “the eternal optimist must be on strike.” These poems go to dark places, where all the fruit is rotting, all the children dead or abused, and all the lovers unfaithful. In the poem “Stories,” Pupek says “There are stories I don’t want to live,/ don’t want to tell, don’t want to write down.” And yet write them down she does, with a fierce clarity that makes it difficult for the reader not to turn away. It is the very excellence of the writing that makes this collection hard to read; if the images were less clear, less sharply drawn, we could go on more easily, not faced with such crystalline photos of ruin. When Pupek describes a therapy session in which inkblots turn into bats, they are “bleeding…/ Blue grey veins…pipettes snapped in half” and end up “Overhead, blind angels [who] flutter shit, and cry.” The senses are engaged, the revulsion complete. Describing the aftermath of a mother’s beheading of her child, Pupek makes us see “the bagged head…[the] small mouth open/ a cavern of milkteeth and flies.”
Imagery of the ravaged body abounds in these poems. Breasts “consist mostly of fat,/but fail to keep [the speaker] warm or well-fed,” or serve as simile for a fallen cake “flat as a breast/deflated with age” and are then removed, with “the smell of scorched meat,/ a black hole in the bandage.” In “Gangrene,” a stubbed toe reminds the speaker of “the stench in his boots;/red streaks growing dark,/wide; sap gathering green /in the deep purple crevice/where his missing toe belonged.” An aborted fetus is “a mass of cells/ splitting, replicating, taking root/ like a parasitic jellyfish.” Mouths are equated with wounds, stomachs are filled with bile, skin serves to cover “watermarks [that] never wash clean.”
The title of the book begs the question: Where is the intercession? Where is the relief for a poet who “…notice[s] things you do not see: a teller’s smirk,/skipped stitches, and ceiling cracks reaching past roof-line”? The speaker in the title poem says “sometimes you must intercede on your own behalf.” Perhaps the poems themselves are the intercessions. Perhaps she, like the writer she imagines in “Contributor’s Notes”, believes in the salvation of “images ignit[ing] in slivered light/…if only [s]he can jot down this color, thin/ and uncorrupted.”
Forms of Intercession is a journey beyond the veil into the gritty, gothic world of suffering. Readers who can withstand its clear-eyed, unapologetic view of pain and its causes will be rewarded with sharp imagery and keen analysis of the dark hidden worlds inside us.
Green Bodies by Rosemary Winslow
March 5, 2008
The Word Works, 2007
Review by Julie R. Enszer
Truth-telling is integral to poetry. Putting the truth into language is both a calling and a struggle for poets. In the forty-five poems of Rosemary Winslow’s first collection, Green Bodies, the struggle of language is evident in both form and content. Green Bodies is divided into three sections and although the book is interwoven thematically each section presents and addresses different concerns.
The first fifteen poems are an elegy for the poet’s brother. Winslow writes with great power and sensitivity about this death. In one of the most ambitious poems of the collection, “Walking Quaker Whiteface Road I Meet My Brother,” she engages both the metaphysical questions of grief in lines such as,
Once in my grief
I saw something of my brother appear
The night after the funeral
As I walked the floors of the house.
A place of whiteness, and sensed conveyance—
as well as the philosophical questions of grief when she writes, “What is it to lose a life you never/had time to live?” Winslow’s lyric and narrative impulses sing in this first section even as she introduces the content that will pressure and transform the collection in the second section.
Narrative wends its way back into Green Bodies leading the book to its conclusion in the final section. The third part can be read narratively as recovery, but it is recovery not only of personhood or the self but also of language. It is in understanding this structure and comment on poetic discourse that Green Bodies opens to its fullness and power as a collection of poetry. The final poem in the book about the dance of two beavers ends with these three words, “startled, suddenly, bliss –,“ a conclusion which even might be the key to the collection.
Winslow is a poet with a keen ear for the music of her poems, but underneath her sonority she is pressing the form and structure of poetry and interrogating language, asking when it works for us and when it fails. This is when her work is most potent: the concatenation of lyric and narrative with sound and form.
Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesley
March 5, 2008
The Backwaters Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma
“a star/which grows slowly/more luminous”: Reading Celia Homesley’s Body of Crimson Leaves
To look at the cover of Celia Homesley’s debut poetry collection, Body of Crimson Leaves, one can easily imagine a Gretel or Red Riding or Snow White, some innocent and utterly curious girl, unafraid of the unknown, adventurous, and willing to get lost, in order to discover the bodies of leaves, the brilliant flesh of earth, and the haunting ease of trees. Homesley’s poems are quiet and unearth a hand willing to remove layers of bodies, slowly, for the hands to discover dirt, to discover a desire to listen to the river that “lies still,/nerves rotted” (44). This is a book of longings that penetrate the senses until the self is frightened, until the self is unabashedly clear about what it means to “die/picking flowers for/the dead” (45).
Body is a journey, of sorts, a collection that, as the title of this piece suggests (from “Night Pond”), reveals its interiors slowly, as if the body of the book itself, and the body of the poems themselves, are stars that do not, at the end of their lifespan, dim, but pulse and radiate, provide light by which the work can be read. In “Lily in Rain”, Homesley writes of a relationship that has wilted and blossomed, through age:
Old love
White trumpet
You curve through the hole
In my fence as if
I will float
Down into this weeping
Press my lips against your throat (16)
Similar to other poems in this collection, “Lily in the Rain” ends inside of a moment, leaning towards a silence, an emptiness, as if the poem itself waits for the luminous moment. Here, the poet leaves us in the stillness of desire, that of the “I” and that of the “lily”: each seems to want what the other possibly cannot and will not give. The sparsity of language, of punctuation, & of the line are further signals of the quiet embedded in curiosity and longing, and the promise of illumination if one is willing to listen and hunger. (Note, for example, that one unusual line, with “as if”, lingering off to the side, alone, and wondering.) These are not easy poems, ones with a firm ending, a closing of the door or the resolution of a problem; these endings signal wistfulness and perpetual aching.
Homesely works at her best when she sets out to discover what she’s willing to anticipate, whether it’s the lily she could press her mouth into, as lover, or the she who waits to dream of taking “lovers./Like shadows” (62). In these poems, the writing is direct and curious, and the poet embodies the minor quakes of need. In the back matter, Ralph Angel notes that “Everything grows in … Homesley’s [poems]. Everything rises and returns.” And if the line is a measure of growth, if the line is a measure of rise and return, then Angel’s elucidations are apt. When Homesley writes of the body in “Journey of the Spiritual Body”, for example, the “child/who feels worthless/save what his fingers/form//steeples/or the visages/of birds” (39) creates, in the line and its break, a body and spirit that “rises and returns”. We have to wait, in Homesley’s poems, for the light to break, to give way to feeling and meaning.
Body of Crimson Leaves builds and shines in this emboldened debut collection. While there are several poems that fall flat (in terms of tone and query), it is the body of imagination, the “chaos/I like to think of as beauty/when no one’s here to tell me otherwise” (31) that sparks and guides.
Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues by Julene Tripp Weaver
March 5, 2008
Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin
The True Portrait of AIDS
Julene Tripp Weaver first studied Creative writing at City University of New York before moving to Seattle where she received her Masters in Applied Behavioral Science from The Leadership Institute of Settle. Since that time she has become a passionate practitioner of Continuum, a movement whose central tenet teaches we are a whole connected to everything in the world transcending time, space and condition. She applies this teaching to her work as an HIV/AIDS case manager, and it is evident in her collection of poems, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manger Wails Her Blues, a unique book where individuals confront death while reminding us that people with HIV/AIDS are just as much a part of humanity as those suffering the effects of any other condition.
To most people the typical AIDS suffer is excessively thin, homosexual, intravenous drug user, and or a prostitute, their humanity and life details are dismissed. Television may allow us to see a sick man, check into the hospital but almost never tells us that no one visits him, no one sends cards, and no one brings him a Christmas tree. We never know he expected to get better, that he passed away with only a picture of himself when he was a beautiful women, or that his name was Rick.
Weekly news magazines do well with teaching us that expecting mothers can pass HIV/AIDS on to both their unborn and infant children but lately it seems such cases occur mostly in Africa. Rarely has a reporter told the story of Barb and Dori, we are introduced during a party, Barb sings, shows baby pictures of daughter, declares that the now, nearly, 20 year old is beautiful despite having cut off her pony tails, despite her being short, despite her positive HIV status but what is truly beautiful is that Barb takes full responsibility / for this child she bore/ with HIV.
Case Walking: An Aids Case Manager Wails Her Blues is populated by those whom we expect to find: homeless people, people addicted to illegal injectables, and a broken system, but what makes the collection remarkable is that without making excuses for behavior; without making religious or moral condemnations, Julene Tripp Weaver shows us the intimate details of her clients lives, making them everyday people who share the emotions, dreams and desires common to all. It is difficult to read How often Do You Change Your sheets, which focuses on a heroin addict who can’t find housing due to his criminal record but says he will change his sheets every day/once he has an apartment simply because there is nothing/like getting into bed between clean sheets, and be unable relate to his desire for a place of his own, an a clean bed to sleep upon.
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
March 5, 2008
Vintage Books, 2006
Review by Mary Senior Harwood
The Beauty of Love
The skeleton of the book follows Alison as she goes to a cleaning job, complains of pains, and tells us she is suffering from incurable hepatitis. Feverish, she walks in the rain and recounts her life, focusing much of the story on an unlikely friendship she struck up after her spectacular rise – and fall – at the pinnacle of the fashion world in Paris. Back in New York, she takes a night temp job proofreading. Veronica, who is described throughout the book in garish terms, has died of Aids. Alison uses her memories to come to terms with the death of her friend.
The story revolves around our perception of beauty – the super model – and the ugly backstory of that life. Alison tells of a career begun on her back – and the degrading role sexual encounters play in the world of glamour. We see a woman who is constantly praised for her beauty, yet who does not accept her beauty or the true beauty in her friend Veronica.
The lack of love shown in the degrading sexual liaisons and a lack of understanding of true love becomes the core of the story. Alone and broken, no longer beautiful, Alison finally sees the love around her she never recognized. The opera “Rigoletto,” used at first as a reference to Veronica’s favorite song, becomes a framework for the story.
Gaitskill’s static, but beautifully imagined, present narration flows continually into flashback, giving the arc of the story. Her prose shows us beauty through words, at times seeming more an extended prose poem than novel. “They were stout and barrel-chested, with a damp, testicular air that was wounded and bellicose and longed to be loved.” The air is “prickled with wind chimes.” As Alison and her father listen to Rigoletto, “Loud voices leapt in declarative oblongs, then divided into fine, vibrant strands of delicacy and strife; father and daughter sang against each other.” Alison hears the story of the opera from her father “as if the idea of a daughter’s honor was like a precious jewel to him, a jewel the world no longer valued.” It is these jewels that retain their value and that make this a remarkable novel that sees beneath the veneer of mere beauty to love.
Single Parent Soldier Woman: From communal support in Boudicca’s time to harassment and standing alone in present day America
March 4, 2008
Single parenting, with or without non-custodial parent/grandparent support and cooperation, is difficult in itself, never mind when the pressures of war are thrown into the mix. Similarly, war on its own, without the responsibility of taking care of a child or children, is also difficult to handle. Combine the two and one can but imagine the compounding stress arising from such a situation.
In “The soldier-parent dilemma” (Newsweek, 1990), Kantrowitz spoke of how parents like Army Sgt. Terrie Cortez, who planned on leaving her baby with her parents while on tour, end up with general discharges when faced with the reality that there is no one to take care of their children in their absence. Other women seeing battle in places like Iraq face not only rape by their male counterparts and suicide, but also death in battle and, if they return to America alive, denied child custody. Granted, men also face these issues while doing military service, but unlike women, they aren’t treated as physically inferior or denied their own voices. Sure, women like Teresa Broadwell and Misty Frazier receive medals for combat bravery, but they receive none of the attention that women presented in the media as the damsel-in-distress stereotypes (i.e. Jessica Lynch) do.
The current western view of women as worthless burdens, especially in times of war (and in, well, any profession, at any time) stems partly from the Roman Empire. One feminist reaction to the deeply engrained societal marginalization of women appears in the retooling of the Boudica woman warrior story. From the Libertines’ lyrics (“The Good Old Days”) that sing of Boudica’s spirit living on through the generations, to Manda Scott’s Dreaming the Bull and women who led armies, the argument that women are not useless cannot be quieted. Cwmfen (pronounced “Koom-ven”) fights in battle with her infant daughter and the babe’s father because she has no other choice.
Boudica herself is able to lead the resistance against Rome because her unplanned daughter, Graine, stays on the isle of Mona under the protection of the priestesses. There is no custody fight over her “best interest”—the community acknowledges and accepts Boudica as Graine’s mother and anticipate her return. 1rst century Celtic children are raised by everyone, not just the lone legal guardian.
The book compares the Celtic community to the spiritless Roman exaltation of the free adult male. Rome’s army is made up entirely of males who love each other physically and mentally. Women aren’t needed beyond breeding or ornamentation in show of wealth. Children do not matter unless they are boys. Boudica’s half brother Bán, a.k.a. Valerius, loves several men including his commanding officer. Outwardly, he only acknowledges women and children when he kills or hangs them during duty. The Roman male-centered community does not work, however, for Valerius is plagued by the ghosts of his family—women included.
The Roman military remains the ideal for many men in the American forces today. Women are systematically denied acknowledgement. The approach does not work even in fictionalized legend. Emperor Claudius’ wife, Agrippina, is not allowed at meetings because she is a lowly woman, but she reigns victorious over her husband in the end by poisoning him and supplanting her own son, Nero, on the Emperor’s seat.
The solution for modern day single parent women in the military, who face more than their fair share of issues, isn’t to poison the men who constantly suppress them, but to band together. The communal life of old, like anything else, has its drawbacks, but the advantages, especially for women and children—and even misogynistic men–far outweigh the negatives.
Notable Quotables
March 3, 2008
Erica Jong, author
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.”
Anne Frank, writer Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
“Parents can only give good advice or put them[children] on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”
Dolores Huerta, activist
“If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?”
Maya Angelou, poet, educator
“It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself, which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.”
Golda Meir, first female Prime Minister of Israel
“Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.”
Why offer you this selection of quotes on this day?
Through the course of the last two weeks in my run up to the publication date of my novel, I have been reviewed and critiqued, buoyed by some words and bruised by others. Fair enough. These are the accessories that come with putting any writing out into the universe. Or any art. Or any opinion, for that matter. If you are like me, you have learned it takes courage to do so.
So, wherever you happen to be when you read the quotes above, I hope they encourage you as they have done for me as well.
Now, go and create what you are meant to create today. And take strength from all the great women who have gone before you.
Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY
Forging Our Path at Midlife
March 2, 2008
by Diane Saarinen
Diane Saarinen: I can’t let the interview finish without focusing instead of on women but on you, Paola – you have, I’m holding a book called A Matter of Choice: 25 People Who Transformed Their Lives. And I read the essay on you in it, and you have such an inspiring story about someone who left corporate America, in midlife, and decided to do what you really wanted to always wanted to do — which was to be a photojournalist.
Paola Gianturco: I did. It’s true! Joan Chatfield-Taylor edited that book full of stories about people’s lives in transition. And my story, as you say, led from a 35-year career in advertising and marketing. And at age 55, I decided to take a sabbatical. I had been teaching as well as working with corporate communications clients all over the country.
And I thought I was, for one year – I didn’t think I was making a life-changing decision – I thought I was for one year going to do what I loved and wanted to learn next. And what I loved was photography and travel. And what I wanted to learn next because my whole experience had been in the corporate arena, was about women entrepreneurs in the developing world. The opposite range of that women’s working experience.
And I made that decision immediately after the Beijing Conference that had taken place in 1995. And I learned for the first time, that women in the developing world were sending their children to school with the money they earned. And that men tended to have the cultural [premitor] to spend the money they earned on whatever they wanted. And often it was radios, and beer, and so forth – and not their children.
And I thought: My God, the women are heroic! I wanted to document their work and their lives and I set forth – naively, not being a professional photographer, not being a professional writer – to do a book in one year. It took five! And I found myself so challenged and engrossed by this new avenue both of learning and creative expression, that although I continued to do some consulting for several years, enough to fund this new passion, ultimately I never went back full time to business.
DS: That’s amazing!
PG: Yes, it was!
DS: I love it though because it really tells people that if you have your own path, you go on it, and it can take a little longer than you think it’s going to take – in your case, you thought you were taking a year and this turned out to be like an all-encompassing project. And I’m glad you did it because I love your work!
PG: Well, thank you very much. And it turns out that I work just as many hours, like twelve to fourteen a day, but I’m doing something that I’m passionately involved in and I’m very excited about.
To hear the rest of the Her Circle Ezine interview with photojournalist Paola Gianturco, please return to our site on Saturday, March 8, 2008, when we will make the full audio available for listening. For more information on Gianturco’s books, please visit www.paolagianturco.com.
