Blood by Alana Sherrill
$14.49
Alana Sherrill’s Blood weeps with a sadness solid as a slave-song coming from a thicket,nthe message strong for what humanity never loses. I mean the flame — it is here — precise, eloquent, powerfully rich in loving rages.
–Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
The poems in Alana Sherrill’s Blood are by and large poems of loss, but it would not be right to call them elegiac, or grieving. Poem after poem explores and enlarges upon Wallace Stevens’ famous line in “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty . . ..” In the first poem “Cadaver,” there is no miraculous sign of passage from the material to the spiritual, only the steady, true resuscitation of memory. These are poems of cycles and seasons, generations, commemorations, tributes. Sherrill’s language, as in “He Might As Well Have Been David,” is a beautiful mongrel, now technical and specialized, now loose and familiar and slangy, now artful and aesthetic, again, much like Stevens. From the gorgeous pantheistic lyricism of “Here After” to the intentionally quotidian prose of “Now,” painfully aware of the imminent apocalyptic irruptions that lurk around every corner to “lacerate lives,” Sherrill’s grounded, steely-eyed faith that “we will stitch patch the place back together, but it won’t be the same” endures.
–Jim Clark
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Description
Blood
by Alana Dagenhart Sherrill
$14.49, paper
As an artist, poet, scholar and teacher, Alana Sherrill is constantly looking for connections between interests. Her latest literary research focuses on “place poetry” of N.C. writers; Ron Rash, Kay Byer, and Robert Morgan, while her latest pedagogical research examines using creative, authentic products to engage students in writing. Sherrill’s conference presentations this year include NCTE and Appalachian Studies Association. Her poems have recently appeared in Emrys, Main Street Rag, and When Women Waken, and her most recent art show was “The Little Things” at Delurk Gallery in Winston Salem.
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