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Reviews for Dirt Sandwich

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This review appeared in Pirene's Fountain at:

http://www.pirenesfountain.com/reviews/owens.html

 

Scott Owens reviews Dirt Sandwich

 

Dirt Sandwich
by Linda Annas Ferguson
Press 53 (2009) 81 pages, $12.00
ISBN:  978-0-9824416-6-4, Poetry
Reviewed by Scott Owens

For poets, every word is a first word, still full of the power and freshness of creation as they struggle without the tools of logic or reason to “put it right.”  In her poem “Breech Birth,” Linda Annas Ferguson captures that sense of urgent discovery in the lines, “I had a hard time getting the beginning right, / . . . no measure / for what is true . . . / an abrupt breath rushing  / into me . . .  filling / my body with a sudden urge to cry.”  She repeats the sentiment in “The First Word,” a poem about Adam’s love of words:

He strained to fill his tongue with every thought,
unable to identify the pleasure, raw
with newness and power, mouth parting--
their genesis and tone feeling true.

                Such is the reverie of Ferguson’s fifth collection of poetry, Dirt Sandwich, newly out from Press 53.  In one poem after another in this collection, Ferguson embraces (a frequently repeated word in these poems) the power of words as a means of embracing life.  In “Genesis,” we hear again of the vitality of language for Adam:

Words lived in his bones,
touched his tongue, still wild,
a slow burning freedom
inside every sound.

How he longed for more words
to love, thought they could save
him from the wet falling sky,
from red flaming sunsets,
from all that hadn’t come yet.

                Whether it is Adam speaking or a woman reflecting on her own audacity in the act of embracing language and all its potential as a child, the theme of language as a tool of exploration and knowledge is the same, as in these lines from “Innocence:”

When I was three, I could write
my name, scrawled it on doors,
walls, furniture, floors.

When Mama took my crayons,
I fingered it in the cold sweat
of windowpanes, paused to dot
the “I,” an eyehole to the moon.

**************************

I can hear my mother’s “Don’t--

touch,” as I poked
at splintering fissures of frost
on the other side of the window--

and all that enchanted me
about the broken.

As these last lines suggest, the poet’s love of the world is not limited to all that we normally think of as good.  Rather, she has a more even-handed curiosity about and appreciation of all experience, all that life has to offer, all that living uncovers.  Seamlessly, the next poem, “Topless Dancer,” begins her stubborn exploration of the forbidden and the tragic:

She embraces her own body,
cups a glitter-laden breast,
a golden moon. Dance
is the way she speaks,
embodies what she can’t say.

Such juxtaposition of the mythic, the individual and the personal from one poem to the next, or even within the same poem, is characteristic of the collection and illustrates the correctness of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the reason Confessionalism still works in poetry.  This practice of relating the individual to the mythic, the personal to the universal as a means of deepening one’s experience of life, granting greater meaning to the seemingly insignificant details of our days, and revealing the still-relevant humanity behind the sometimes all-too-distant stories that represent us as a species is again made clear in “Rainbows Are Real:”

Once I saw a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the center. Pilots call it a “glory.”

I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies.

And so it continues throughout the book, each poem teaching us to reach deeper into the joys, the sorrows, and the mere details of life to find meaning, to understand that pressed between birth and death is the stuff of life “alive with dying” (“The Origin of Entropy”), the stuff of our very own dirt sandwich and to remember, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell ,that there is “still time, / for one who can groan / to sing, / for one who can sing to be healed.”  It is a story everyone knows but few pause to contemplate.  Thank you, Linda Annas Ferguson, for helping us be aware that we live.

 

 

 

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Linda Annas Ferguson knows—to borrow Wallace Stevens’ formulation—that “Death is the
mother of beauty.” She proclaims in one of her poems, “Everything / is drenched with endings,
alive with dying.” Her work exists at the shimmering mid-point between an urge to celebrate
the world’s beauty and a pained recognition that this beauty is mutable. She recognizes that our
being only temporary inhabitants of this life is not a problem to solve but a mystery to feel—and
a mystery that compels us to make poems. As she wryly puts it, she is “dying to write / a decent
poem.” Linda Annas Ferguson has done more than that. She has given us a book of tender,
clear-eyed, complex meditations, a lovely book by a poet whose vision we can trust.
                                                                                — Chris Forhan, author of Black Leapt In

Dirt Sandwich is about love, loss, and, above all, vanishment—”an oyster, still silky and iridescent,” “the ocean, never deep enough.” For me, the book has three touchstones—the title poem, in which a woman whose husband is dying takes the earth he will become into her own body, “Midsummer’s Eve” in which we see friends between two worlds galloping through the dark woods outside a bonfire’s circle, and the last poem in the book that ends “You whisper/‘stay,’ to the small of my palm, my cheek/to all I thought was without need.” Three touchstones are more than the law allows, but Linda Annas Ferguson has achieved them and with her permission I’ll be carrying them, warm in my pocket, on my own journey.
                                                            — Lola Haskins, author of Solutions Beginning with A

 

 

                                                    The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, Stanley Kunitz once wrote.

                                                                                — Cathy Smith Bowers, author of The Candle I Hold Up To See You

 Reviews for Bird Missing from One Shoulder

WordTech Editions (2007)

The Wild Goose Poetry Review
Summer 2008 Volume 3 Issue 2

http://www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com/reviews.html

A photo of the author’s mother adorns the front cover of Linda Annas Ferguson’s wonderful collection of poetry Bird Missing from One Shoulder.  In a sort of poetic full circle, that image is clearly repeated on the back cover in the photo of Ferguson herself.  Given the continuity of these two images, it should come as little surprise that the poems are, in part, dedicated to Virgie Nelson Annas, and that it is the spirit of an often underappreciated but strong woman, a self-sacrificing and persisting force of family that runs throughout the body of the work.
       
Through these poems the reader comes to appreciate the personal sacrifices made by the speaker’s mother as she “rises at five” (“Making Biscuits”), “hides money for a child’s needs” (Mama’s Closet”), hangs “wash outside on the line” (“Choices”) and “kneads with such ease it barely touches the heart of the palm” (“Making Biscuits”), all the while staying “at home / waiting for her own life” (“Lying in State”), listening “with her eyes shut,” (“Mama’s Apron”) and believing “she wasn’t anyone” (“Anonymous”).  Even in the poems that focus on the speaker’s father it is the mother who leaves burning “a seashell lamp from a beach / we’ve never seen” (“Living Room”).
       
Do not think, however, that the poems can be reduced to a mere elegy for the speaker’s mother, for they are also the story of a girl growing up in a place that will be familiar to most readers from the small town South of the 20th century (and deserves to be familiar to those from elsewhere), a place of “fragments . . . parasites . . . bones thrown about” (“Cotton Mill Hill”), a place where “all streets lead to the cotton mill” (“Living Room”), “funerals cost too much to die” (“Graveyard Shift”) and “life comes in pieces” (“Almost Fourteen”).  The greatest part of that growing up in this volume is the process of learning to accept grief maturely and of coming to understand the “austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden calls them, of parenting and forgive the shortcomings accepting those offices often result in.  

Ultimately, Bird Missing from One Shoulder does what most poetry aspires to do, to save what might otherwise be lost, the world not simply as it happens but as it is felt.  The poems literally enact the final lines of “Mama’s Closet” where the speaker’s mother is seen “saving the girl she wants/ to remember, every small portion of paper / a folded page of herself.”
 

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.

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.

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

Reviews for Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk

by Linda Annas Ferguson

Finishing Line Press

  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

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.

                                                                                         Executive Director, Kentucky Writers’ Coalition

Reviews for It's Hard to Hate a Broken Thing

by Linda Annas Ferguson

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!

                                                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.

                                    PHEBE DAVIDSON

                                    Editor, Palanquin Press

                                    University of S.C., Aiken

                                    and author of Dream eater

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