Book

Jordan, Judy, 1961-

Carolina ghost woods : poems / Judy Jordan.

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, ©2000.

59 pages ; 24 cm

The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas' border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness -- inclement and consoling by turns -- of nature and agriculture. Jordan, though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair. She offers a poetry of witness that does not sacrifice the aesthetics of language and rhythm: "Here I bring my sorrows / like the delft blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss."

Poetry.

American poetry.

Poetry.

Sharecropper's Grave -- Scattered Prayers -- In the Shadows -- Saying My Prayers -- Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow -- Prayers to My Mother -- Long Drop to Black Water -- Carolina Ghost Woods -- Killing at the Neighbors' -- Through These Halls -- Hitchhiking into West Virginia -- A Taste for Falling -- October -- A Short Drop to Nothing -- Two Hours before Sunrise -- Sandbar at Moore's Creek -- Walking the Geese Home -- Winter -- At Winter's Edge -- Fragments in February -- The Delivery -- In the 25th Year of My Mother's Death -- Silences -- Dream of the End.

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