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Reviews for Bird Missing from One Shoulder
WordTech Editons
2007
In Bird Missing from One Shoulder, Linda Annas Ferguson has written a poetry collection that movingly renders the beauty and sadness of life’s transience. The poems about her father’s life and death are especially impressive, for they depict not only an individual life but also a way of life now vanished from the Southern landscape.
RON RASH, author of Eureka Mill and Saints at the River
It is art that turns the hardships and tragedies of our lives into something quite beautiful—something that ultimately teaches us of the alchemy of poetry. Linda Annas Ferguson’s poetry in this collection never succumbs to the temptations of sentimentality and self-indulgence, even as she writes these moving poems about loss and memory. She looks back at loved ones with a clear-eyed sense of detail, a quest to find the poem where it is and not where we want it to be. This is a skill that good poems eventually master. Simply put, these are beautiful poems—well-shaped, carefully considered and wonderfully imagined:
It is when you can’t hear
the sound of yourself
that you know who you are,
a body, no longer solid
standing in an ocean.
The sun, a hole in your world
where time burns through.
------Kwame Dawes, Director, SC Poetry Initiative and the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence, University of South Carolina
The narrative spell of this book is as strong as that of a good novel, allowing us to enter the life of a Southern, cotton mill family and experience its warmth and difficult struggles head-on. Ferguson’s work is both tender and fearless. Bird Missing from One Shoulder contains poems about death, but also about the small, happy moments of one family’s day-to-day life. It is sprinkled with surprising and original tidbits. “I could still smell the boy in you,” the poet tells us in “First Kiss.”
PATRICIA GRAY, author of Rupture, Red Hen Press
Windhover
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Press
Belton, Texas
January, 2008
Volume 12
by Michael Lythgoe
(Michael Hugh Lythgoe was educated at St. Louis University, The University of Notre Dame and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He taught at Syracuse University, worked for the Smithsonian Institution, and directed an educational foundation. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Visions, Revisions (Painter, Va.); Brass, (Kinloch Rivers Award); and Holy Week, Xlibris Press.) He has read poetry on NPR and the Lehrer News Hour (PBS)
Linda Annas Ferguson was the 2005 Poetry Fellow for the South Carolina Arts Commission and served as the 2003-04 Poet-in-Residence for the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. She grew up in North Carolina. This past summer, she gave a reading to launch her new (and first full collection of poems) at the Monday night Blues series in a coffee house setting. This reviewer was there. There is a tradition at the Monday Night Blues readings to begin with a bit of music played on a traditional native American wooden flute. They call it their Invocation. The spiritual music set the tone for Ferguson's elegiac poems. Later reflections on the reading reminded this reviewer that the mysterious (ancient?) flute music was a lovely intro for the moving poems colored by loss. In the interest of full disclosure, let it be said Linda Ferguson and the reviewer are friends through the Poetry Society of South Carolina. The poems were not all new to her fans; we had shared a venue at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia.
The collection, Bird Missing from One Shoulder, takes its title from the poem, "Yard Sale."
At the corner of the flower bed,
a newcomer kneels on his knees, caresses dirt
from a two-foot statue of Saint Francis.
"You should keep these weeds
from taking over your garden,"
he remarks as I near his worshiping body.
"Have you come to redeem me?" I jest,
as if offering him a job. He wants
to know the price, takes into consideration
corrosion, the bird missing from one shoulder.
("Yard Sale" 74)
The lines cited above reveal the strength of this book of poems. The stories read like a novel, narrated in a single voice transitioning through a life in the South. You will find characters and loss, but here's a tender art that lets light fall into the human heart, even as there is darkness and heartache. There are echoes of Biblical stories in her lines of poetry. We see a St. Francis statue, broken, still loved, attracting a gathering of "shoppers" at a yard sale. Somehow we feel everyone around the statue is looking for love; the broken statue is still love. All the drama is conveyed in soft language, subtle, eternal. Linda Ferguson demonstrates poetic skills, insights to envy. Her stories may not be new; her memories of loss not so different than the memories of loss in other families. Yet, they are compelling--as she sets them out sparely, touched with humor. Her poetry has a quality of renewal. Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer-poet has said: "Practice Resurrection." Read renewal. Ferguson is not as openly prayerful as Berry, but leans in his direction. She ponders what is broken, but does not dwell on the glass half-full.
This book of poems is divided into 3 sections. "Evidence of Things Unseen" is the opening selection. Here we visit a girl, childhood in a textile mill town in North Carolina, attend prayer meetings, remember a mother's biscuits, spring at age fifteen and a first kiss, being "defenseless/in the delicate dark," (33) A personal favorite here is the nostalgic, romantic-sad "First Kiss":
We drank warm milk from the cow,
your hands cupped around the udder.
Your elbow brushed my breast.
To show me your strength
you split stacks of scrub pine with an ax,
each blow separating the boy from the man.
The last day of summer, your hands
cupped my face, guided a kiss to my lips.
I could still smell the boy in you. (33)
Innocence will not last. We grow up. Things change. But the poem masters the art of understatement, sensual suggestion.
"Settling for Uncertainty" is the second section of poems. Here we learn more of loss, brown lung disease, aging parents, funerals, grief.
Life is a killing thing.
I sit on the grass
by the creek
crushing clover,
throwing crusts of bread
to my reflection.
Each time I look into its stare,
I feel the strangeness
of meeting myself.
There are no prayers to pray.
Under the surface
there are no answers at all.
This likeness of me
is the only beholder
of my life.
I must trust it,
go swimming alone,
touch the bottom.
("Mother's Mirror" (62-63)
Section three is "Outside the body Looking In." If we are stilled by grief and loss, we must go on living, swimming. Linda Ferguson gives voice to grief through her art--she reaches out to others grieving, to others in a Southern landscape:
In the South, even the rain is too soft.
Leaves grow limp from hanging on,
wanting only to fall.
Moss shrouds tree after tree,
pretending to grow grief,
the days so slow
monotony heals every sorrow.
("A Southern Sense of Time" 77 )
Nice use of nature to convey emotions. nicely compressed feelings; a very real picture.
These poems keep faith with the past--memories, words, metaphors, parables, art, music. "if the dirt has nothing to tell us,"still "we might be falling toward God," Ferguson writes in "What Would Jesus Say" (78). Doubt is part of faith. This poet can help us prepare for lives after death with her art, falling softly as Southern rain, a monotony, a silence we can hear. Readers can find reasons for life in such lines. Find company in the atmosphere of these poems.
Reviews for Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk
by Linda Annas Ferguson
2006
“Linda Ferguson’s elegiac poems about her father and mother, both of whom worked in textile mills, capture the lives of a dying generation of southern laborers. They came from the farms and hills to the small towns, married and raised their children, and worked loyally at their jobs until the jobs were no more. When her father returns from his last night on the graveyard shift, “white lint clinging to his hair / like a disintegrated halo,” we celebrate the unsung heroism of these men and women whom Ferguson depicts with the love of a daughter and the sure hand of a mature poet.”
R.S. GWYNN, author of No Word of Farewell
Reading Linda Annas Ferguson’s poems is like watching a good documentary. I believe what I see: real images, real memories. And I believe in this poet’s commitment to preserving the truth--however hard or bleak--about her parents’ lives, her personal history. I am moved by the intimacy of these poems.
DAVID TRINIDAD, author of Plasticville and The Late Show
MAIN STREET RAG
Review by Phebe Davidson
Spring, 2007
Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk
By Linda Annas Ferguson
Finishing Line Press (2006) 26 pages, $14.00
Poetry
Angel Pays a Visit
by Carolyn Elkins
The Emrys Foundation (2006) 17 pages, $12.00
Poetry
As recently as the mid-1980’s, a poetry chapbook was likely to be a relatively inconsistent affair, a collection of randomly themed and formally mixed poems by an emerging poet. These new titles from Carolyn Elkins and Linda Annas Ferguson, both of whose names are well known to readers of Southern poets, are superb examples of the sea-change that marks today’s chapbooks. These collections are tightly themed, made of beautifully ordered poems that last in a reader’s consciousness. Designed to be read at one sitting, they read like a unified longer poem and demonstrate with authority that the chapbook as a form deserves serious critical consideration.
In Angel Pays a Visit, Elkins opens with what seems to be a whimsical premise:
I thought we had mice in the attic,
I said. Shows you
how wrong you can be,
he said, his voice
deep and bloodless. . .
(“Angel Pays a Visit”)
And so is born the conceit that will carry us through all twelve poems, offering insights into humanity that range from the comical to the glorious, from angel wings that “float out the moon roof / and stream like contrails behind us” (“Angel in the Car”) to the narrative speaker’s dream “. . . about my own body / rising up, stretching across the night sky, / outlined by wisps of nebulae / a body infinite, bright, / made all of stars” (“Angels Don’t Sleep”). The novelty of these poems plays beautifully against a rich and subtle dramatic tension. Every poem is executed with astonishing deftness, and the narrative arc of the collection as whole leads the reader to that happiest of resolutions, a glimpse of something wondrous both beyond and within the self. The lyrical Elkins line, the breathtaking image, the immaculate surprise of the best poetry—all are here in generous measure.
In Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk, Ferguson takes a very different tack. There is no whimsy in the opening poem, which closes with these stanzas:
The doorknob of home cannot feel
the almost sleep in his head. Inside,
the walls stare at each other
as if he weren’t there. The light by the bed
strains in the dark, a hungry hole.
The sheets know every crease and wrinkle
of his skin. He covers his head with the flat sky
of flannel. Dreams, worn thin as old cloth,
close his heavy eyes, slow his pulse.
When he wakes, they cling to him all day.
(“Textile Mill”)
The unifying theme is mortality as the poet reveals it in a series of elegiac poems for her father and her mother, poems that resonate with strongly felt memories of the all but vanished life of Southern textile mill workers and their families. The images are telling, from the father who comes home with “white lint clinging to his hair / like a disintegrating halo. . .” (“Laid Off”), to the wrenching “Our mother believed / she wasn’t anyone. . .” (“Anonymous”), to a kind of leaden continuance as the poet visits the sick: “I take each vase a daisy. / They watch it die.” (“Visiting Hours”) The book closes with people leaving a graveyard. The poet tells us, with a sonorous grace impossible to overlook:
On our way back to sleeping and waking
we step on cracks in the sidewalk
that could be a warning
we might be falling toward God.
(“What Would Jesus Say”)
These collections, by two very accomplished poets, vary considerably in tone and style. They suggest different sensibilities and somewhat different visions of what it means to be fully human. The first book begins in whimsy, the second in grief—yet both come to life in well-wrought verse. Both Elkins and Ferguson stretch the power of line and image as their poems earn a place in the world. Both take their readers on a journey that is more than worth the ticket price, more than worth the hazard of the game.
Reviews for Last Chance to Be Lost
The poems of Linda Annas Ferguson are beautifully crafted and deeply moving glimpses into her world. Whether she is describing the hard life of her mother, or the first morning with a new lover, each poem is an exquisite distillation of experience that leaves the reader feeling as though they were there living that moment with her. LAST CHANCE TO BE LOST represents a poet at the height of her power.
POET LAUREATE FOR THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Through language as unpretentious as it is moving and precise, Linda Ferguson captures the plain unperfumed warmth of a world she refuses to let slip away. It is a synesthetic world in which sound brushes ear with a cold hand and questions …flow in and out like purple pain. I applaud these poems for their toughness, their tenderness, their exquisite craftsmanship.
CATHY SMITH BOWERS
Author of Traveling in Time of Danger
In Last Chance To Be Lost, Linda Annas Ferguson has created a gem in which each facet both mirrors a unique experience of love and allows us to peer deep beneath the shiny surface into the lives that make love real. Her visions are invitations to explore and gain understanding of those formative moments that turn the child toward maturity without giving up the seeds of youth. These are poems about the big issues--love, life, loss, and growth.
EDMUND AUGUST
Executive Director, Kentucky Writers’ Coalition
Reviews for It's Hard to Hate a Broken Thing
It's Hard to Hate a Broken Thing contains the wise, tender reflections of a poet willing to probe the past without trying to prettify it. Linda Ferguson keeps her eyes open, her ears tuned to the world. Her subjects are primal ones of parent and child, light and dark, hope and leave-taking---and, unequivocally, death. Her deep-felt truths are likely to be found in the smallest detail, from an empty apron pocket to the coat hanging from the nail of the bedroom door. My advice is to read the poems, and then read them again--and again.
SUSAN MEYERS
Author of Lessons in Leaving
and past president of the North Carolina Poetry Society
Linda Annas Ferguson's new chapbook is one of the most powerful collections I've read in years. These poems about love and loss in a southern mill town bruise the heart. She captures the gestures, patterns, care and ultimate loneliness of her parents and other good people who live hard lives. Her voice is so honest, her lines so clean, her insights so original and tough that we can only hope for more of the same. A treasure!
DENNIS WARD STILES
past President of the South Carolina Poetry Society
and author of Saigon Tea; Black Mirrors; and Spit and Other Poems
Linda Ferguson's work in It's Hard to Hate a Broken Thing is a rare and wonderful gift to the reader, poems that are quiet, understated, beautiful, that can shake one to the core.
Editor, Palanquin Press
University of S.C., Aiken
and author of Dream eater
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