Post by shayepoet on Jun 3, 2008 4:34:43 GMT 2
Across the Dark
Pam Bernard[/b]
"This collection is full of threat, calamity, and grace. These
poems, short and clean, employ plain diction--no minced words, no
inaccessible passages, no hiding behind the spectacular. No
linguistic gymnastics here. These are quiet poems often about
disastrous events--"No intervals no let up--" (note, not even a comma
there to give us a second of reprieve at the end of Silk). They are
poems where even hopelessness is rendered delicately.... About as
dark as you can get, yes, but keep reading, read to the very last
word of this book. But try, please, to read this book as it is
presented to you , in order, let the poems accumulate one after the
other as the poet intended. Give, please, this book that respect,
and give yourself, reader, that kind of time with this remarkable
collection."
--Martha Rhodes
Sample poem:
t h a t w i n d
i
The night my mother was born wind
lifted the barn roof and set it down whole
in a field a mile across town—where sweetcorn
swooned up from mosaic flatland, windrows
of hedge apples pitching leeward.
And when she confides her longing
to return to the place where, when things turned
dangerous, she spiraled inward
to the dark of the canning cellar, its windows
like portals, the house a ship
creaking above her, to smell the wind
raking the prairie—I bring her back
to wave upon wave of corn leaves,
arched and ripe and so precisely arranged
the idea of it won’t hold still—
The sun warms her broad face
and ordinary dress, her body rooted, finally,
in its proper hemisphere. I call to her
where she stands, a slim finger
on the horizon, and when she turns, her eyes
are afloat in their sockets. All my life
I have wanted that wind to mean this.
ii
And because nothing escaped her father’s
domain, when the storm passed he
searched for the roof, which now
looked oddly perfect where it lay,
as though the barn had sunk
suddenly to its rafters into that field—
and finding it, took it apart board by board
with a plunderer’s imprecision.
iii
Now a riot of moths rises
above the heat. Sawflies and digger wasps
thrum their hinged, transparent wings.
From a welter of redtop, gentian,
and goat’s rue, a wood thrush appears,
milky throat glistening.
Nothing rests here that remembers—
not the fireweed, nor the chicory, nor
the Queen Anne’s lace, its precise, dark center
a tiny, distant planet—where leafhoppers
hum and the foxtail and timothy lean:
a tyranny of cathedrals.
Review for Across the Dark:
"Bernard, a Boston artist, writes from a retrospect of difficult
experience. The speaker of the poems is a witness, in both personal
and public worlds. Bernard draws images out of family history, from
street scenes, and from visual art works. Her career as a painter is
vivid in her work. Not a familiar"confessional" poetics, it is
imagistic in practice, yet informing stories press behind the poems.
Scenes from nature play counterpoint, sometimes reflecting, sometimes
threatening...Compressed metaphors connect and expand to reveal the
structure of the book. Cathedrals usually signify the reach of
institutional spirituality; in these poems, psychological and
historic "dark" are made palpable and crossed through. A sanctuary
is under construction. The work is inspired."
Excerpt from Madeline Tiger's review
in Home Planet News
About the author:
Pam Bernard, poet, painter, editor, and teacher, received her MFA in[/b][/i]
Creative Writing from the Graduate Program for Writers at Warren
Wilson College, and BA from Harvard University in History of Art.
Among her many awards are a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship in Creative Writing, two Massachusetts Cultural Council
Fellowships in Poetry, and a MacDowell Fellowship. TriQuarterly,
Prairie Schooner, Salamander and the Marlboro Review are among the
many journals in which her poems can be found. Her most recent full-
length collection of poetry is entitled Across the Dark. Her new
manuscript, entitled Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond, which
explores the human drama a the Great War, is scheduled to be
published by WordTech in 2010. Ms Bernard lives in Walpole, New
Hampshire and teaches writing at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.
Website
ISBN 1-930907-08-7, 59 pages, $14.00
Main Street Rag Publishing Co, 2002
[glow=teal,2,300]BUY HERE: BUY NOW:[/glow]
Website: pam@pambernard.com
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