|
|
|
|
|
|
HomeShop at BookSurgeLawGeneralNeedles of Light |
|
|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 1 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Painful....and beautiful Feb 06, 2010
By Lolalu
Needles of Light doesn't claim to be an easy book to read. This is truth in advertising. Many of the first dozen poems deal with a drunken father who brutalizes his wife and rapes his daughter. Child welfare intervenes but that adds a new layer of horror as sisters are separated. The tide turns at "Becoming a Foster Child" when Ann goes to live with a kind couple. Suddenly she has "a room of my own/ a closet of clothes/ a clock radio/ a 45 rpm record player/ college." The poems that follow give hope to any child who's ever been harmed that it's possible to find the resilience to love and be loved and to become a successful parent. The cycle of abuse can stop.
Ann Hartsfield is the birth name of Patricia Martin. How many of the pieces are autobiographical? "Fewer than half," she says in the introduction, "unless authenticity of feeling counts as autobiographical in which case all are." Hartsfield/Martin is straightforward enough to be read by anyone but other writers will get additional enjoyment from her occasional use of forms such as two pantoums and a villanelle. Some of the 67 poems written over the course of two decades have the keen sense of wonder about nature that one might find in Mary Oliver's work. The title poem begins with the lines:
needles of light
embroider the back
of a weary doe keeping watch over
the fawn suckling her nipple
The book is dedicated to Max, her beloved mixed breed dog ("part West Highland terrier, part English sheepdog and whatever else got helixed into his DNA.") Several poems cover the 15 months from his stroke to his burial and beyond when it's hard to believe a close companion is gone. Look for the tiny picture of Max on the back cover.
Some poems chuckle with humor such as "Moneypenny Loved Double-O-7." There's unfortunate truth in "Mirror, mirror on the wall..." -- being the fairest of them all is doomed because Beauty itself is not fair; it's all too willing to attach itself to a newer, younger woman.
Needles of Light begins with the darkness of a child huddling in fear inside a wardrobe and ends with blue skies and a rising sun. It's a profoundly satisfying journey to take alongside a guide who's been to the Underworld and lived to turn her face to the light.
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
|
