Customer Reviews

Prayer to a Purple God

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For Prayer To A Purple God: Each poem focuses on a health emergency, the body's vulnerability, the acts of doctors and nurses, and the vivid inner perceptions of those involved. Simultaneously, astonishingly all are painted in terms of larger contexts and presences of earth. In the critical care unit, one patient is half woman and half bird, one crawls across the glass in an aquarium like a snail, one has a torch in his skull, one has a physician illuminate "her arteries and shelves/ of bone in a ruby gloom," one is held "within white-curved wings"... Though grounded in the profound struggles and emotions of the hospital, many of these poems are reminiscent of Neruda's odes in how they focus and yet open through metaphor and association. This is one powerful, compassionate, and unique book of poems. James Grabill, author of Poem Rising Out of the Earth, Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 1995.

For Prayer To A Purple God: These are sharp-edged, dark poems that speak a dangerous truth about the health of humans in these hard times of our earth. They reflect the changed landscape, the changed life of the body of woman, the body of God, the body of this land with its newly hazardous terrain. Yet there is light here, water, air, prairie grases,and heart. These are poems to pay attention to, about what it means when health slips like a ring from earth's finger. -Linda Hogan, author of Solar Storms, Dwellings, The Book of Medicines