Carolina Ghost Woods by Jordan, Judy - 2000

New York: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. Brand Newin Fine DJ; Marfree, acidfree gift qual 1stEd; not written-in, underlined, club, remainder or ex-library. Mail SAMEDAY! Publishers Weekly: Wintry in tone, titles and topics--"Ice molds my life" as one poem puts it--Jordan's debut scours the wooded terrain for metaphors of death ("It's dirt and dust after all") and trolls her family history for murders, suicides, threats & promises of the end. The governing influence here is Charles Wright, whose learned, long-lined, colloquial mysticism speaks through lines like "The dead stow my name in the slack of their mouths, " or "the dead have me in their pocket, " yet places such possessions in specific situations, as "When Hitchhiking into West Virginia" or when stuck in "the all-night deli. " The book's wanderings come as a result of mourning for a variety of figures: the poet's grandmother, other relatives, friends, neighbors violently dead. As poems answer each other and develop the theme, the dead become the poet's lost form and lost work--particularly the mother. When the speaker watches toads possessing "faith in their wholeness and desire, " she knows what she lacks. Alliteration, internal rhyme and other resources of sound are on impressive display throughout the book, which won last year's Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets, but the whole can't quite lift grief out the specific grievings. ; 0.48 x 9.39 x 6.37; 59 pages; From Library Jour: It is hardly surprising that Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle Award, for the energy in this book is palpable and the language so inventive and so surprising as to remind you what poetry is all about. The poet has taken a hard look at her life as a sharecropper's daughter in the Carolinas and delivered something bolder & richer than one could ever have imagined. David Klima Wash, DC: "Carolina Ghost Woods" is a clear-eyed, gut-wrenching, soul-renewing tour de force. The influence of C Wright is in evidence, particularly in very long lines, a few of which have "low rider" Jordan also has developed her own version of the "low rider, " in which the underlapping part of the line does not underlap any part of the first part of the line, but simply drops a line below the first part of the line, and continues horizontally, where the first part of the line leaves off. But, the effect is all Judy Jordan's. No astute reader could read this poetry and fail to be deeply moved by it. #These are poems that grieve the constant occurence and effects of violence, and of loss itself. My favorite poem (here) is "Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow, " which opens#"In the moon-fade and the sun's puppy breath, / in the crow's plummeting cry, / in my broken foot and arthritic joints, memory calls me. "#Calls us, and calls us, and calls us. To horrendous, unspeakable loss the loss of the speaker's mother, and others close to her, the loss of a safe, civilized society for a poet to grow up in, and the loss of anything so profound as faith, to be grieved and consoled by landscape, and nature's astonishing beauty, and prayer. The attention to landscape and nature, the desire for healing, and the poet's brilliant use of language all combine to create a ghostly and powerful (though partial) redemption through grief and natural consolation#The ONLY bone of contention I have. Comes with the very last poem in the book, which IS the entire fourth (and last) section of the book, which is about a dream of nuclear radioactive devastation to me, this poem is not as strong as any of the other poems. #The title alone, "Carolina Ghost Woods, " is enough to draw me in, and make me want to open this book. The poems are a .