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9781557530400 Academic Inspection Copy

Do Not Peel the Birches

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In her second collection of poems, Fleda Brown Jackson holdswith 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; andhome as a place called Central Lake. And when the poems move outward -to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, Kitty-Hawk, Roanoke, St. Pete Beach, and theMississippi River - the past keeps resonating. At last, the voice thatremembers becomes nothing but a riding, a hunger. If Iwere a swan, she imagines, "The world would move / under me / andI would always be exactly / where I am." There is an end to history, Jacksonsays, when at last real life and art are able to merge: a mythic Elvis stepsout of her ancestral outhouse, and his singing sounds very much like her ownvoice. "It's not as if one vent stands / beside another, separated by adelicate / membrane," she writes in another poem. It's "all done throughimages, the blood of fear, / of rage, soaking through the towel."
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.
"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 "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
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