Do Not Peel the Birches - Softcover

Fleda Brown Jackson (author)

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557530408 ISBN 13: 9781557530400

Publisher: Purdue University Press, 1993

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In her second collection of poems, Fleda Brown Jackson holds with a meditative rapture to the place she call home - home as family, the source of trouble and joy; home as the embellished stories of family; and home as a place called Central Lake. And when the poems move outward - to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, Kitty-Hawk, Roanoke, St. Pete Beach, and the Mississippi River - the past keeps resonating. At last, the voice that remembers becomes nothing but a riding, a hunger. If I were a swan, she imagines, "The world would move / under me / and I would always be exactly / where I am." There is an end to history, Jackson says, when at last real life and art are able to merge: a mythic Elvis steps out of her ancestral outhouse, and his singing sounds very much like her own voice. "It's not as if one vent stands / beside another, separated by a delicate / membrane," she writes in another poem. It's "all done through images, the blood of fear, / of rage, soaking through the towel."

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Review:

"When domestic poetry reveals the profound and the esoteric, it does so in a circuitous way; but when it does it is moving and, sometimes, terrifying. Fleda Brown Jackson is face to face, in these domestic poems, with the wilderness, whether she is swimming with an old aunt or waltzing at the Pappy Burnett Pavilion or remembering her father taking her retarded brother sailing. A culture is revealed here; and a brave vision."

--Gerald Stern

"Jackson's clear note restores my hope that speak directly - and meaningfully - from the heart. The poet emerges triumphant, as from her night swim, 'illuminate, sexy as hell, inspired."

The Georgia Review

--The Georgia Review

About the Author:

Fleda Brown Jackson's poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Ariel, and Southern Humanities Review. She has also published essays on William Dean Howells, D. H. Lawrence, and other contemporary British writers.

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