Heather Derr-Smith's second collection journeys to the rough core of desire, creating and destroying binaries along the way. Familiar artifacts of domesticity become as volatile as land mines, and the streets of Damascus, Calcutta, and other faraway locales obliterate the American landscape. Yet Derr-Smith's poetry transcends time and place, illuminating the ties that bind man to woman, mother to child. A young son's purposeful breaking of a bowl hurls the speaker back to the unconnected shards of her past. An everyday scene outside an elementary school expands into a soulful meditation on the nature of violence and grief. The Bride Minaret is a relentless chronicle of experience, where the sacred and profane become interchangeable, where Every tent has a name, and every name is the breath of you.
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In The Bride Minaret, Heather Derr-Smith explores the complex and difficult realities of our global world more comprehensively and comprehendingly than most American poets consider even attempting. Often paying close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them--Arabs in Europe, Americans in the Middle East, Mennonites in Iowa, Balkan refugees, Roma orphans, Palestinians, and, at the heart of the book, a mother now separated from her former, childless self--these poems ultimately argue that dislocation is itself a kind of location, just as living forever in one place can end up dislocating oneself from the realities of our time. --Wayne Miller
The Bride Minaret is a book of emotional, literary, and cultural substance. As Mandelson wrote of Auden: the poems bear witness to the close connection between intelligence and love. The same can be said for Derr-Smith, whose work is global, with settings in Iraq, British Columbia, Algiers, Paris, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Cairo, the West Bank, and various U.S. locations. Her poems are intercultural, expansive while still grounded in the evocative complexities of motherhood, childhood, and faith. The Bride Minaret is a wonderfully intense collection. --Denise Duhamel
In The Bride Minaret, Heather Derr-Smith explores the complex and difficult realities of our global world more comprehensively and comprehendingly than most American poets consider even attempting. Often paying close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them--Arabs in Europe, Americans in the Middle East, Mennonites in Iowa, Balkan refugees, Roma orphans, Palestinians, and, at the heart of the book, a mother now separated from her former, childless self--these poems ultimately argue that dislocation is itself a kind of location, just as living forever in one place can end up dislocating oneself from the realities of our time. --Wayne Miller
The Bride Minaret is a book of emotional, literary, and cultural substance. As Mandelson wrote of Auden: the poems bear witness to the close connection between intelligence and love. The same can be said for Derr-Smith, whose work is global, with settings in Iraq, British Columbia, Algiers, Paris, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Cairo, the West Bank, and various U.S. locations. Her poems are intercultural, expansive while still grounded in the evocative complexities of motherhood, childhood, and faith. The Bride Minaret is a wonderfully intense collection. --Denise Duhamel
In The Bride Minaret, Heather Derr-Smith explores the complex and difficult realities of our global world more comprehensively and comprehendingly than most American poets consider even attempting. Often paying close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them--Arabs in Europe, Americans in the Middle East, Mennonites in Iowa, Balkan refugees, Roma orphans, Palestinians, and, at the heart of the book, a mother now separated from her former, childless self--these poems ultimately argue that dislocation is itself a kind of location, just as living forever in one place can end up dislocating oneself from the realities of our time. --Wayne Miller
About the Author
Heather Derr-Smith was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971. She spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She earned her B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia and went on to earn her M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, TriQuarterly, Fence, and Margie. Her first book of poems, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), was about the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.
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This review is from: The Bride Minaret (Perfect Paperback)
As Wayne Miller writes, Heather Derr-Smith's second full-length collection, The Bride Minaret, "pays close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them." A couple of poems center on orphans or refugees. Still others survey the modern Middle Eastern landscape from an outsider's perspective. But more than disconnection, The Bride Minaret is also a book of volatile juxtapositions, where the domestic sphere, in particular, offers little escape from the surrounding political terrors of our time. "Gift," one of the finest poems in the book, exemplifies Derr-Smith's precise pacing and unparalleled agility. When the speaker's son pushes a cereal bowl onto the floor from his high chair, breaking the dish into pieces, the purposeful gesture sends the speaker back to another mystifying moment a decade ago:It was a gift I bought in Paris After the Charlie Chaplin festival And the stranger I kissed by an unnamed canal. The stranger, too, was unnamed, and we didn't speak. I didn't know then, nor do I understand now Why I followed him and why I opened my mouth, Except for the pleasure of it. Later, in "Bit," the speaker reflects of her son, "One day this one I love could kill me, if he wanted." Throughout the book, the voice of Derr-Smith's poetry showcases the capacity to ignite, saying almost anything at anytime, however desperate, satirical, honest, or irreverent. In "Blow," when the political and domestic spheres collide, the speaker reflects that "My son would love war," and "I feel as if I've come home. Genocide always has that effect on me." Or later: The truth is, poets are liars. And prayer? Get down on your knees and suck. In "The Bell," a mother watches children spill out of school when the day is over, which somehow leads to this wonderful stanza: When my mother dies, I'll change into a man Living in women's clothes. I have a collection of Nanette Lepore dresses. I'll go breastless. She always said there such a wide gulf separating this world from that. She won't see me. I'll run like a man running like a woman. Themes change, of course, as we encounter settings like Cairo, Paris, and the West Bank. But at their core, the poems themselves do not. The work of Derr-Smith is fearless and without peer. At times stark, endearing, wry, or sexy, The Bride Minaret is a must read. And once you're done, you've got to read it again. After all, when the speaker of "Anatomy" says, "I'll do / Everything, everything // Just to touch you," you won't know whether to be frightened or flattered. Or both.
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