5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Country: A Book of Prophetic Poetry, April 19, 2000
This review is from: Hard Country (Paperback)
Out of print since 1987, with a new foreword by the publisherJohn Crawford and a new afterword by Doubiago, this second edition ofHard Country restores to general availability one of the great booksof twentieth century American poetry. Presented in four parts, Headstone, Headland, Heartland, and Heartsea, the final and briefest part which contains the couplet "behind the livid hieroglyphs a woman/ I don't see is on the horizon of the desert, screaming," and closes the entire epic with:
buoyed for the moment on my barren coffin, my soft-shelled eggs, with only love for hope look back onto the whole country, its lethal tide its love of death its hatred of love and warn you
So we can't say we haven't been warned, and warned in no uncertain terms, and in a multitude of tones. "I am the history of this country" the poet declares in the poem "Bicentennial," which ought to make it pass muster with at least the Ezra Pound traditionalists where an epic is a poem containing history. Hard Country contains several great and distinct individual poems as well including the poem "Hard Country," about, like much of the whole book, Indians and their effect on Americans of all kinds. "One said you think you're just surrounded by your tall buildings/ and farms, but we're all around you. You'll never be rid of us," and later, "They're inside our bodies now where they can't be fought." Other great poems include "I was Born Coming to the Sea," "Avenue of the Giants," "Crazy Horse," and the poem "Wyoming." Back and forth across this country with her face turned straight at it, the poet goes at her peril, reciting its terrible history against the backdrop of its equally awesome potential. This is a poem of the "West" in America because it frequently traces history from the West to the East, in the opposite direction to which the European incursion occurred and from which it is usually taught, as if the history of this disaster was coming towards us instead of spreading out, "over there," beyond New Jersey as our culture is falsely imagined from the fortress of New York. "There is just something spiritual about poetry, something about consciousness, the psyche; it tends to drive you into the forcefield of others and other things. It seems to provide a more direct means for making emotional and truthful critiques of the culture and the facts of your life," Doubiago claims in her "Afterward." Speaking of her methods, she says "Sometimes there really is a beginning, middle, and end. Postmodern/language poetry, the current enforcer against narrative and the I, is not just the poetry of those of us in genuine resistance to the King and exploration for the free world, or simply of the rebellious young who are trying to get away from home, but ominously, the poetry of professors, critics and the Corps who must stay impersonal. It's the poetry of the married and employed, the academicians and the trustfunders. It's the poetry for those who aim to keep their relationships of blackmail. Hard Country is an attempted synthesis of these conflicting aesthetics and consciousnesses, including also the poetics of my college educators who were mostly New Critics and formalists. It holds the vision that many of our writing rules and attitudes are of the same mentality as the U.S.'s genocidal policy of Manifest Destiny, the military's `law and order' that led us into Vietnam and all our wars (all stupid, tragic, and avoidable) the legal and psychic control of women, all non-whites and their cultures, and our ongoing ecological destruction of Earth. It is a quest for full consciousness, a fuller reality in writing anyway than had ever been allowed me, a child of America who believed like religion in its guaranteed `freedom of speech,' and an attempt to be honest in writing, to admit to my own participation in the evil, however helpless and innocent. To try to face the consequences of my privileges. To try to get free." Doubiago is a poet who says she wants to "occupy space without filling it." Reading the love written into every line of this poem is a transformative experience. She is able to write, in "Austin: The Making of a Boy," as sympathetic a portrait of Lyndon Johnson as we're ever apt to get. So too her marvelous rendition of Sitting Bull. These are real people in our history and our lives. "I was so slow to talk that I was threatened with specialists. I wouldn't talk because of the self-mortification of imitating and obeying...All my life I've wanted to just speak, truth out of my mouth without pretext or artifice." Hard Country is a book of warmth, substance and style. Entire books will be written about it. Like all great works, it will take longer to write the exegesis than the text itself occupies. There isn't a library in this country, personal, public or private, that won't be enhanced by having Hard Country in it. Doubiago meets the test of the best prophetic writing, cf E.M. Forester and his opinions of Emily Bronte, Melville, Lawrence and Dostoevsky, by looking straight at her subjects without flinching, for finding the exquisite detail that conveys the whole, and for feeling so deeply about the subjects that they acquire the power of song. It is the tone of broken love, the passionate plea for a future that makes the work prophetic. Doubiago has said that when we talk about soul we're talking about our feelings. There will be feeling in your future. The rest of time will be recognizable and indistinguishable from the past. When you begin to feel, as this poem is capable of stimulating you to, the doors to the future can open.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The American Epic, September 14, 2007
This review is from: Hard Country (Paperback)
I don't know why so many refer to "Hard Country" as a woman's epic. Any red blooded male with a scrap of intelligence and a bit of soul will be fiercely moved by this magnifiscent work of art. It is terrifying and profound in its relevance to the American Condition and deserves the notoriety of only the most relevant works of American literature; "Moby Dick" and stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft; and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
The central image is that of Isis looking for the members of her lover and brother Osiris' body. With that kind of scavenging intellect and an almost hypervigilant sensitivity Doubiago peruses the traumas at the bottom of the American soul conjuring poetic images of her lost love from America's living ruin. Hard Times for all - as the song Charles Dickens once referred to goes.
That sort of endeavor shines with its own greatness. A greatness of scope and magnitude combined with an impossible intimacy and tenderness - a tenderness that is strong but not unseemly.
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