Description
Poetry. In "One Less River," Terry Blackhawk follows Hafiz's injunction to "Greet yourself / In your thousand other forms / As you mount the hidden tide and travel / Home." Hafiz, through this epigraph, serves her well. The book journeys through loves and losses, elegies for friends and poets, and walks for a while alongside Protea, a mythical female persona—before arriving at various explorations of ars poetica. In the search for home, the poems also take on a variety of poetic forms—shape-shifting, crossing boundaries, inhabiting myriad beings. While steeped in nature, the poems nod to city skylines and are never far from an awareness of inhumanity's toll. One Less River covers a lot of ground and deepens on second and third readings. Set on beaches, shores, or along the Detroit River and on the city's beloved Belle Isle, the poems follow the author's "hidden tide" to Venice, Provincetown, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. One door opens the manuscript; another ends it. While borrowing throughout from Whitman, the door in the final line of the collection leads back to Dickinson whose room, with its light and simplicity, invites us in.
Author Bio
Terry Blackhawk is the author of many poetry collections, including ONE LESS RIVER (Mayapple Press, 2019), THE WHISK AND WHIR OF WINGS (The Ridgeway Press, 2016), ESCAPE ARTIST (BkMk Press at the University of Missourri-Kansas City, 2003), winner of the John Ciardi Prize. Her awards include a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for the Arts. She has poems in many journals and anthologies and on line at Rattle, The Collagist, Solstice, Verse Daily and elsewhere.
Author City: DETROIT, MI USA