Customer Reviews

Carolina Ghost Woods

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I stumbled upon this book when Ms. Jordan came to a literary conference at the university I attend. This poetry is absolutely amazing. I'm fairly well read in contemporary poetry and this is the most startingly lucid book I have read all year. In my opinion it surpasses the works of more famous poets. June Jordan won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets for this book. Such greats as James Tate and Agha Shahid Ali sing her praises on the back cover, so it's not just me. Her poems take that extra step beyond beauty to brilliance, to truth. I simply cannot rave enough, and I'm definitely gushing at this point. I'll leave you with a small quote from my favorite poem, "Two Hours Before Sunrise." "I have lain in a johnboat/ in water churning with mating toads,/ thinking of nothing but the pond's depth/ and my desire to be picked clean." You will not regret buying this book.

By happenstance we were introduced to this wonderful volume on an airplane, sitting next to author, Judy Jordan. She allowed me to leaf through her worn copy. While reading I asked her questions that were possibly painful, so moved was I by such honest and harsh and beautiful reflection and observation. Her words wrestled me into my own honesty/my own memoirs of observing violence/ of the solace of winter and of the woods and geese. The writing does justice to itself. This book is a gift of insight. No superlatives can I use other than to say, this is one of my all time keepers.

In this slender volume, justly hailed as a wonder by several reviewers, Judy Jordan crafts the most beautiful, thought-provoking and elegiac poetry out of the less promising circumstances - poverty, alcoholism, murder and death - and gives us lines we aren't likely to forget.

I came upon this book by pure chance, and I'm happy I did. Despite her often dismal subject matter, Judy Jordan is a joy to read. Get the book now, thank me later!

I pulled Judy Jordan's "Carolina Ghost Woods" off my bookshelf again tonight. It's a cold and clear here in the deep south and Jordan's poetry called to me in the wind. "Carolina Ghost Woods" was first published in 1996 by Louisiana State University Press, and Jordan writes that she submitted this book for three years as a "first book" before it was awarded the Walt Whitman Award in 1999. The first poem, "Sharecropper's Grave" sets the tone:

The night is hoot owls, wind-whistled flue, babies bundled in burlap.
Breath of another child, mid-gasp.

The alliteration causes the reader to shiver in the cold and continues throughout this poem:

Small holes, secret graves,
children scattered around the iron fence.
Not even a scratched stone. . .
The night full of cries they will never make.
To read the title poem,"Carolina Ghost Woods" is to travel into the mythos of the south, to hear what the dead whisper,
When the leaves shudder to the muddy ground
and snow under the gutters puddles red,
when the bird lifts, the rabbit shivers in clumped grass
and the fox shrinks into the bramble,
when the shadow crosses the pitchfork's broken handle
and the hinges of the shed door rust,
let me believe someone is there.

Each poem in the book reveals another story from Judy Jordan's life. They are woven together to bring the reader through the death of her mother and the violence of being on the streets, homeless. Ms. Jordan joins the reader in this journey with her breath and voice and we walk the ghost woods together.

Buy the book and settle down with a fire in the fireplace and the lights dim, read "Caroline Ghost Woods" from start to finish . . . you won't regret it.

While it's true that Jordan's technique seems a bit thick with "borrowings" from Charles Wright, her actual material (and her treatment of it) is wildly original. This book is shocking, heart-wrenching and, at times, almost unbearably beautiful. An urgent and necessary voice.

As a creative writing student at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale I was immediately fascinated with the program's newest addition. Already the school boasted the great Rodney Jones. And I began reading SIUC's newest professor/poet Judy Jordan. After several readings, I am still amazed. Whether it be the remarkable, pain-staking craft or the soul-drenching childhood and early adulthood that she narrates with such originality and heart-thrashing grief, Jordan simply takes your breath away.

This collection, unbelievably a debut, doesn't just grip the reader with it's wrenching family tragedies. The music, sounds, carefully sought words (both for sound, connotation and meaning) and an ambition leaning towards the transcendent makes for a potent statement.

Currently, I am enrolled in a poetry course with Ms. Jordan. Let this not be a bias in my review. I admit am unabashedly biased towards male poets. For whatever reason, I can see through the eyes of a Rodney Jones or a James Wright easier. However, Jordan's book truly strikes a chord with me. It doesn't beg for pity. It doesn't make the predictable turns. It endeavors for something more. In addition to pain, guilt and embarassment, it finds joy, hope and transcendence in this person's impoverished, tragic past. It bears minor resemblances to the work of her former teacher, Charles Wright, as well as carrying influences of poets she's worked around in the past: namely James Kimbrell and Donald Platt. But as their style is of their own, so is hers'. And Jordan's ability at true poetic craft, rhapsodic forms and ear for human dilemma is more than original, it is ground-breaking.

During a time when poetry's popularity is at an all-time low, fresh work from the likes of Jordan and Kimbrell are keeping the medium alive. There is something very spiritual in this movement. I only hope, that when my time comes, I can be a part of it.

Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)

Judy Jordan writes dense, exquisite poems that both shock and satisfy, while making you feel vaguely like taking a shower afterwards.

"...it informs the toads,
crouches them in crooked caves of alder roots,
pulses the pale skin under their slack mouths,
keeps them in the pond's tight waves clutching anything:
a pine's resinous knot, a fist of chair foam,
even a drowned and legless female."
("Long Drop to Black Water")

I loved this book; very easy to see why it won the National Book Critics' Circle Awards, though I have to admit I'm somewhat surprised that they received such heavy subject matter with such aplomb. This one's definitely a keeper. ****