leerazer's review against another edition
3.0
Springer's first collection here I'm going to place in the drawer marked "shows good promise". Bit of a cheat really, since I already know her second collection, Murder Ballad is an awesome piece of Southern Gothic. Dear Blackbird, is okay, with some real nice moments, but I feel its emotional impact is lagging its poetic artifice. These poems mostly don't seem very memorable to me. And yes, it starts out with poems about horses. Nicely done poems about horses, but... still.
The second of the four sections in this collection is I think the strongest, and my favorite of the collection is here, Lamentations, a lengthy prose poem about the poet's deceased mother and widowed father.
The second of the four sections in this collection is I think the strongest, and my favorite of the collection is here, Lamentations, a lengthy prose poem about the poet's deceased mother and widowed father.
He speaks of their love this way, exuberant & eternally naked. Which is how she wanted to remember it, too, after she lost use of her legs. & the two divided beds & eventually rooms that seemed to span separate sides of the house, in Tallahassee, Florida. Cancer does not love to sleep, or to share a bed, but wants a room to itself. This is the wayThis evocative, and dark, pinning of memory in a specific, and Southern, place location is something Springer will do so very well in Murder Ballad.
darkness keeps to itself, its own room of disappointments & dreams-
the owl awake, the cock asleep. The morning glory twisting up the telephone pole & closing the purple shades of its many mouths, till daybreak. The phosphorescence tossed on the gulf waves, until the last of the lit shrimp boats have met the dawning shoreline. Night has its own reality, apart from day.
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