Books by Jeannine Savard |
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The years Jeannine Savard has spent teaching at Arizona State University have produced in her new poems a spirit-inhabited desert landscape. Her poems in My Hand Upon Your Name establish a significant stylistic departure for Savard, whose earlier work from Trumpeter (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993) and Snow Water Cove (University of Utah Press, 1988) were more closely knit narratives. She employed the same close attention to detail and color in her early “The Birth of the Mortician’s Goddaughter,” and in other poems situated in a small mill town in the mountains of New England. The poems from her second volume accrued greater heft and they began to intervene between dream and reality. In “A Tale of Hair,” the poem tells us “Her life was small and kept going / In and out of a dream of a dead uncle / With joe-pye weed in his hand.” However, in her new poems the interweaving is implicit. These poems effervesce with images, surprising juxtapositions, a way of writing that is unhampered. ... The poet’s shifts in perspective animate her interaction with reality; in a sense, Savard changes our perceptions about how poetry can be made. “The jackrabbit ran / and the ivy began to change the moment / from big-in-itself to don’t-you-grieve.” I admire these poems with their mirage-like Western landscapes, her meditations in India.
Savard writes with a painter's delicacy but in three dimensions, elaborating on all the sensual aspects of her scenes, revolving around them with both mystical aloofness and motherly sensitivity. . . . Savard's poems leave us staring and surprised. They leave us reconsidering reality, seeing things slightly differently, seeing things anew.
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Updated:
November 9, 2010
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My Hand Upon Your Name