Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems

by Judy Jordan

Overview

Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death are the features of this collection of poetry, set amid the landscape of the South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807125564
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2000
Series:	Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
Pages:	59
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Judy Jordan 's poems have appeared in Poetry, Crossroads, and other journals and will be included in the upcoming anthology American Poetry: Next Generation. She has been the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship, and the first-place prize in the Western Humanities Review's Utah Writers Competition. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

What People are Saying About This

James Tate

A startling first collection of poems–startling because of the bone–crushing violence and poverty, and startling also because of the beautiful and precise language the poet brings on these scenes…The genius of these poems is that they insist on seeking the human despite devastating circumstances.

Editorial Reviews

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 and 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. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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 and richer than one could ever have imagined. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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