7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Telling Tales of Dusk, November 23, 2009
This review is from: Telling Tales of Dusk (Paperback)
What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In Telling Tales of Dusk by Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems "County Fair," "Star Lite Motel," "Betty's Roadside Diner," and "Saving Grace," respectively.
And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how "Queen Anne's lace dandies up a ditch" ("Queen Anne's Lace"), in how an old woman's moaning is like the wind "when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks," ("Assisted Living") searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.
The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in "The Speckled Trout Café," the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife "the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds" in "Papa Never Learned to Read," and the blues guitarist in "Delta Blues" who, the speaker comments, "should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but" instead lifts "it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen."
These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, "tell all the truth but tell it slant." In "Smoke and Mirrors," for example, Erickson doesn't spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: "The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you." Similarly, in "Daisy Chain," she presents the image of four little girls "daisy chained" to their mother to illustrate "belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement."
Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading "Blue Hydrangeas," you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you've never known and that you're not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flashes Above the Clouds, October 26, 2009
This review is from: Telling Tales of Dusk (Paperback)
I'd suppose it was about 35 years ago on a Christmas Eve when I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette during a snowfall. In wonder, there was silent lightning above the clouds. I think the unsmoked butt burned my knuckles. Long since thought forgotten, the uncanny beauty of that night returned when I read Terri Kirby Erickson's remarkable book of poems, "Telling Tales of Dusk."
These verses are alternately earthy and ethereal, carefully wrought with a delicate hand and fingers that appear to know how to make fists. A lone tree-rat becomes as slender and precious as a Ming vase in 'Squirrel'. A cat-head biscuit - sharecropper's grub - and three eggs in a country café becomes the history of the world in fast-forward. Many of Ms. Erickson's wonderful poems revolve around such seemingly off-handed details, but her voice is always elegant and carefully distilled. And I think: this is the trick that Yeats pulled, isn't it?
In 'Granddaddy's Ghost' the poet remembers her mother, a girl herself then, in the kitchen as the poet's grandfather is stricken and dies. His ghost, his soul, becomes the wispy smoke from a pot of beans scorching on the stove while the living tend to the dead "as if he heard his little girl cry and came running". Such calm and cautiously chosen words suggest years of thought and discernment.
With 'Lilacs' she describes her husband being asked by the undertaker's removal men in suits to hold his father's head, and guesses how very heavy it must have been, but concludes you made him seem light as flowers/ as if you were a small boy holding/lilacs, careful not to crush them in your hands.
This is the voice of a witness, and one humble enough to envy the strut of crows.
This is the sight of lightning in a snowstorm. I could recommend no current book of poems more urgently. These poems are gifts to the world.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A pre-review...about "Telling Tales...", August 21, 2009
This review is from: Telling Tales of Dusk (Paperback)
I can't wait to read this book! Terri Kirby Erickson has a way of bringing a soul home to roost. Her poetry, is indeed her own song and she creates images that catch you on your way through life and make you settle in, be still, and listen to her melodies. In doing so, you can find your own voice again. That is the true gift of a poet. Her inspiration, from her first book "Thread Count", spread to my own life and I am a poet now. Humble to be sure, I write poetry about Donkeys through The Donkey Sanctuary in the UK. Terri's poetry brings a sudden quietness and modesty to the world. I found myself re-enchanted with my memories. Memories that I may not have willingly gotten too close to. I liken Terri's poetry to the loveliness of the writings of Mary Oliver. True poets that create miracles, make you smile at your fears, because you fear nothing.
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