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Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems
Judy Jordan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. 59 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-8071-2555-5.
Jordan arranges the poems in four sections: "Carolina Allowance"; "Along an Unseen Edge"; "The Silence, The Bone-Weary Sound"; and "Dream of the End." As I read these poems I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's statement in A Room of One's Own: "For we think back through our mothers if we are women" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989: 76). This collection is haunted by the memory of the poet's mother and the effect that her death had on her daughter's life. The collection is Jordan's sustained effort to make sense out of that effect and move forward in her own life.
The daughter of sharecroppers, Jordan opens the collection with "Sharecropper's Grave (for my grandmother)," followed by "Scattered Prayers (CNHJ, 1927-1969)," a poem dedicated to her mother. Set in "the world of memory, the world of prayers / tossed to the crows," this second poem introduces one of the governing ideas of the book: that we have so many questions about life, and we're always searching for answers. In spring as she tills the soil the poet figuratively unearths her mother in a world that is "time's mirage," where life is "sleight-- of-hand and the clown's dance" (2). Jordan recounts family history, remembering "the farm she worked her life for," now lost (2). Her mother represents "what's left-four chimneys / and sun breaking across the roof" (3). Memories of her mother's work and her sacrifices inform the details of the poem.
In "Saying My Prayers," the speaker contemplates the first blooms of forsythia and their "passion of abundance" that "defies the ice-covered city." She's waiting for something, she says, in the last lines, "waiting / on whatever comfort you [her mother] might send" (7).
History informs "Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow," as the poet moves back and forth in time. She remembers her childhood home where a slave, trying to escape, was murdered in 1863. Suddenly she shifts to 1976, when she was beaten for playing tennis with a black boy. Then it's 1969, the year of her mother's death. A litany of the dead follows, and out of it she tries to...