Carolina Ghost Woods
by Judy Jordan
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The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas' border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness -- inclement and consoling by turns -- of nature and agriculture. Jordan, show more though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair. She offers a poetry of witness that does not sacrifice the aesthetics of language and rhythm: "Here I bring my sorrows / like the delft blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss." show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Jordan is one of my favorite poets. Her writing is equally gritty and beautiful. Often, while I'm reading her work, I find myself stepping back and saying "whoa." There is nothing else I can say. Just "whoa." And that's one sure sign of a fabulous writer.
This collection, her first, left me wanting more sometimes, but there were still many "whoa" moments. I've read parts of her follow-up, Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, and loved it. I look forward to reading it straight through.
This collection, her first, left me wanting more sometimes, but there were still many "whoa" moments. I've read parts of her follow-up, Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, and loved it. I look forward to reading it straight through.
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3+ Works 118 Members
Judy Jordan teaches at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale.
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- Languages
- English
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