Colorfast
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place
Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this life-affirming and refreshing fourth collection, McLarney (Forage) finds beauty in simplicity and experience. These long-lined narrative poems are skillfully rendered, steeped in the southern Appalachia of her foremothers' kitchens and landscapes. McLarney's voice is direct and companionable as she traces how the past, which melts away into history and heritage, lives on in the solar plexus of memory. Her poems about a cat rival Christopher Smart's depiction of Geoffrey in "Jubilate Agno," capturing the animal's grace and mystery: "of all the litters ever bred./ And couldn't the stripes/ of all the tabbies, untwined, turn out to be a single string?" Elsewhere, she considers creation through the stories of Adam and Noah while examining her husband's ribs: "if he was called keel-chested, at least he might be a boat./ Yes, let him be an ark where a creature can shelter, stay." Heaven resembles "an empty homestead, set way back from any road," where the speaker prefers to be. These excellent poems are a testament to finding wonder in the world's simple truths.
