Witch Dance
New & Selected Poems
Glenna Luschei
Presa :S: Press 2010
$13.95 ISBN 978-0-9800081-7-3
"our ashes left before us.
Who said we couldn't fly?"
Confession and cowboys, despair and crisp reality serve the poems in clear presentations with a touch of emphatic sympathy, "It's all there, the gingko tree loves pollution…" Luschei empties her voice onto the page and lets the reader hear verses steeped in a message which declines an invitation. Yet at the same time we are partakers because of the writing. Luschei creates poems like witnesses, a settler who carries everything they own to a promised land and finds hard work, loss, and:
"When I wake up
with sand in my wrist
I know
I've crept again to the sea
searching for your hand"
The beauty of being placed alone on an open page, an area with succulent flowers and words that form blankets against what has been inevitably the result of a larger plan, nature gives comfort and can also become warring winds, notions sewing each poem together, effecting the verses until the reader is immersed in their energy, feels the exposure to the elements. The poet lives within and also resides outside:
"The mica I bring you
scatters in my pocket,
but the Hunter Moon
tracks it to the tarmac.
Why scan the moon's two continents for love?
Our friends shout, "look around!"
It's here beside us
on the dark side.
We fold the linen with lavender
and sage."
We meet the poems head on without frills or foolish rambling. The dance of words is infectious and the poet's personal freedom opens each page.
Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press
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