Local News from Someplace Else
by Marjorie Maddox
Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Oregon
2103
13:978-1-62564-094-9
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The History of Bearing Children by Jacqueline Murray Loring Doire Press, Co. Galway,Ireland
2012
978-0-9827470-9-4
Available for purchase at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod
and at www.capecodwriters.net
I’ve only recently had the pleasure of meeting
Marjorie Maddox, long distance. After my
December 2013 review of Barbara Crooker’s, Gold, Marjorie contacted me about
reviewing her new book of poems, Local News from Someplace Else. As it
turns out, Marjorie lives in one of the most beautiful regions of Pennsylvania,
where I was fortunate enough to live from 1977 to 1982, and I recognize a
number of the places she refers to in her poems. In fact, my sons used to love going to Clyde
Peelings Reptile Land, described in a
poem by that title.
It was a too difficult choice to make, and, after reading both books, I realized that they shared a concern with the incursion of violence/tragedy into modern life—whether through first or second hand experience. Consequently, I decided to ask both poets the same questions and to examine poems from each book in relation to the other.
About the same time as Marjorie
introduced herself to me, I met poet and sister Southwest Writer member, Jacqueline
Murray Loring, who contacted me for information about the Women Veteran’s
Writing Salon I host. Jacqueline gave me
a copy of her chapbook, The History of Bearing Children, and asked if I would
consider reviewing it.
It was a too difficult choice to make, and, after reading both books, I realized that they shared a concern with the incursion of violence/tragedy into modern life—whether through first or second hand experience. Consequently, I decided to ask both poets the same questions and to examine poems from each book in relation to the other.
Since meeting, Jacqueline and I have
participated in several projects together, including 4 Voices on the 4th,
a spoken word performance about military
family life which I directed as Writer in Residence at the Museum of the
American Military Family. As script
writer for the MAMF exhibit, Sacrifice & Service: The American Military
Family, I also included Jacqueline’s poem, “Braving the Storm,” on our “Return
& Re-integration” panel. Jacqueline is also a family member performer
in Telling, Albuquerque, our local production of The Telling Project which I am
co-producing/writing with Max Rayneard, Senior Writer/Producer for The Telling
Project
(http:// thetellingproject.org ) .
(http:// thetellingproject.org ) .
We cannot get away from violence/tragedy in our world, though we
can make a good stab at it if we live in the right place and have the right
amount of money. Even then, as the title
of Maddox’s book, Local News from
Someplace Else, implies, the daily news brings us reports of violence/tragedy
from around the world. Although no more
than 1% of the US population has a member of the family serving in the US armed
forces, hundreds of thousands American men and women have served in combat
during our last thirteen years of war.
Their return and reintegration into family and community is too often
complicated by the physical and /or emotional wounds of combat. This was also
true of those returning from the war, about half a century ago, which set Loring
on the path of wife to a Vietnam veteran.
The History of Bearing Children recounts
the effects of war on the returning soldier, spouse and family. In the books under review, Maddox and Loring,
each take on matters easier swept under the rug.
Local News, with its three sections and 65 poems, includes poems prompted by
both tragic and comic headlines, as well as mainstream family concerns. Throughout Local News, Maddox weaves the tragic, the comic and the heart
warming. The book’s last poem, “A.M.: INSIDE AND OUT,” ends with “our two small
ones trailing after us/ into the wonderfully, brightening world.” Maddox has looked at the darkness and come
out into “the hills/ that belch so early, ‘Hello, hello, good morning.’”
History, with its 32 poems, offers us pictures of how a wife and family can
choke for years in the aftermath of the early life war experience of one of its
members. Loring’s last poem “The Supplanter Walks on Water,” ends with “I see
my life/ a series of storm tides, crashing/ waves, sky-blue-pinks and blues,/ a
rippled sand bar.” Two poems earlier,
she writes, “I see my diamond sparkle,” the book’s most hopeful line, and the
poem’s last after 9 lines of increasingly frightening images in “Triple Canopy.” This after the previous poem, “Curse the
Rainbow,” ends with “Still, the sky clears, our bed stays warm,/our children
grow, fathered by that/ uncursed piece of you we hold.” She also finds the
good, the possible in life, in the midst of its rubble.
After considering several organizational schemes, I decided to
structure the discussion according to a condensed heroine’s journey outline in Maureen
Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, her
variation on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s
Journey—both books worth the read, if you haven’t already. Having spent twenty+ years as Jungian psychotherapist,
I find archetypal layers in many things.
My apologies to the poets if I am reading things they did not intend
into their poems. In my opinion, poems in both of these books illustrate stages
of the heroine’s journey, and writing them required that each of the poets
undertake their own version of the heroine’s journey. The books contain accounts of wrestling with
darkness in the process of birthing self in relationship with others: spouse, children, and anonymous others who
impact their lives through personal contact or the media. Both compassionately imagine and engage their
own and others’ sufferings and, to some extent, joys, however fleeting. In this
review, we will look at ten poems, two for each of the following stages of the
heroine’s journey: her ordinary life;
her call to the heroine’s journey; her trials; her underworld experience; and
her step onto the road of return, or in more mythological language, rebirth.
~~
Ordinary Life: Most of us
quite reasonably want a happy, comfortable, and rewarding life. Some of us are lucky enough to get it. What ends ups being ordinary for one person
may not be ordinary for another. And poems about ordinary life events,
especially those written from the distance of time and experience, often contain
foreboding about the challenges life, or fate, will throw in along the way.
Loring’s poem, “Engagement,” starts with a trip to Boston antique
shops to find just the right ring. The
search brings back memories of her Aunt’s stories that “in the sun along the
riverbanks/of the South China Sea stones lie,/fill with hope, wait for
lovers.” Romantic images on first reading,
and until the reader realizes that Vietnam is on the South China Sea. The ring, with its smooth jade stone and sharp
cut diamonds, is “[a] part of my life,” what outsiders see as well as the meaningful
and mundane chores of family life. To
this point we have a moving poem about the symbolism of a jeweled ring. It could easily fall into sentimentality. Like a snake in the South Asian jungle, the
poem turns, at first, almost without our noticing. “Sometimes in sunlight/I
caress it, stare into the opaque green/ consider my vows, imagine/other
settings, aunt’s yarns”—but these are not yarns about “scarabs and jade” in
rivers. These are “yarns/ of damsels in
distress, a captive princess,/lady warrior: all with blessed hands/they wore
their rings into battle.” The poem ends
with the tension of these images, moving us from the smooth “jade” life to the
sharp facets of a cut diamond, a marriage that will also be a kind of battle
ground.
~
Like a number of Maddox’s poem, “Indelible,” is a tongue in cheek
account of an absurd mythological-underworld-like wedding where the groom added
a wedding ring tattoo to his extensive body art. In a delightful play on image and word, the
wedding included on the spot tattooing, after which “fuchsia-dyed cake
injected,/ inconveniently, with badly burnt brandy/ was cut in precise slices.” And here, with this “fuchsia-dyed cake…/
…placed on a skin of napkin//which is what I ate,” we slide into a hint of
Persephone’s story of eating the pomegranate seed, which forever joins her to
her underworld lover. But the speaker inverts the image. She ate the cake deliberately “the moment I
saw your permanent eyes, /a half-heart tattooed so vividly/ on each matching
lid.” This could be an applied tattoo, but I read it as the delicate web of
blood vessels often visible on human eyelids. Consequently, instead of being
imprisoned in the underworld, this cake eater lands in the world of the
ordinary love, remembering, however, the “burnt taste” hint about what other
elements ordinary life might entail.
~~
The Call: Historically,
child birth has been an ordeal of the order of male combat, since so many women
lost their lives in the birthing bed.
While modern women seldom die in childbirth, and have more control over
questions of whether and /or when to become a mother, pregnancy remains a tricky
threshold event. Pregnancy opens the
door into what happens after the pregnancy—whether it be the loss of a child or
the obligation to raise a child to adulthood.
It is such a womanly and common patch that it seldom gets recognized for
the heroic series of ordeals that it entails.
~
In Maddox’s “PLEA TO AN EMBRYO,” the speaker, in the voice of a
parental “we,” addresses her unborn child, barters with the embryo inside her
about all the things a parent and teenager barter about. The bitter sweet implication is that the
embryo is as willful as a human adolescent.
The dream, hope, plea is that the fetus will stay put in the womb long
enough to have a chance at becoming an adolescents. This child is wanted and already loved, and
the parents who love her beg her to “Wait, take your first breath. Think/before
you split/ into nothingness. You’re
still//under our roof/and rules.” The
speaker seems to understand that she has a greater chance of enforcing rules
with a rebellious adolescent than she does of forcing the unstable fetus to
“[s]tay put.” The poem, its tone rooted in good old fashioned sympathetic
magic, ends with a variation on one of the most common promises made by
exasperated parents, “you’ll understand/ if you’re older.” If the poem has not already left the reader
breathless, the substitution of “if” for “when” will knock the wind out of her.
In Loring’s “Perpetual Ritual,” the “normal” dynamics of
mother/fetus/father are intruded upon by the husband/father’s flashback from
his time in Vietnam. All starts
well. “My finally pregnant belly/
outlined safe and high, adjusts to your gentle rocking.//I watch you/stroke our
unborn child.” As if the poet counted, bad luck enters on line 13 when the
father’s “suddenly closed eyes” cue eight lines of “booby-trapped memoirs”
about the wartime death of a pregnant Vietnamese woman, “her yellow gaping
belly, that child,/your bloody friends all dying.” The speaker also grieves, “I
kiss your mouth too late/ to save you from this battle.” And, as happens after every death, there is
eventual resignation and acceptance, and the rhythms of life go on, however
stark and limping. The last line reads,
“In the morning I’ll change our sheets.”
These parents do not seem to be in danger of losing their child, but the
traumas of war leave them both in danger of being lost to that child and each
other as they embark on the simultaneous journeys of child rearing, and
recovery from combat related trauma.
~~
Trials: Carl Jung said that
if we do not choose to follow our destiny, it will come to us as fate—tempted
or survived. Professor Elizabeth Vandiver
of the University of Maryland defines the “fatal flaw” as a past decision that
has negative consequences the character did not foresee when we made the
choice. Once she has answered the call
to the heroine’s journey, the heroine must make the best choices she is capable
of and hope they are the choices that will lead her to the treasure.
~
In Maddox’s poem TWICE, a man and a teenage woman, with no
connection to one another, both survive their encounters with lightening. TWICE is written in couplets with an
irregular pattern of near rhymes. And I
must mention the lovely, and humorous (in a black-humor way) allusions Maddox
works into the narrative, which serve to lift the mundane story into at least
the literary, and perhaps the archetypal, heights. When he was struck the man was below a “split
tree/ spead-eagle above him like a Frost poem/wounded. And that made all the
difference.” Meanwhile, the teen fell
victim to “lightning’s long finger tapping her twice,/ a parody of the daVinci
painting? /For weeks she was a celebrity.”
Both tempted fate and both won. To
this point, this is a nice narrative poem, with some classic allusions. But as
in many of her poems, Maddox follows the story with reflective stanzas.
But what odds we
all give and take,
daily loading
blank dice into our hopeful palms.
Bad things happen
in threes,
but its twice,
the highly unlikely,
Maddox could end the poem on this hopeless note. Instead she ends
with a challenge to “the survivors of ‘bad things,’ / of storms blindingly
fierce and electric.” Storms—natural,
emotional, bodily—that leave us asking if
even on clear,
bright days,
will we continue,
with hope
or fear, to look
up straight
into whatever
warms us?
We could claim, as the poet reports the papers said, “He is a
fool,…/and should have known better.”
But, in fairy tales it is often the fool who survives the trials, finds
the treasure, rescues the captive, returns home. Heroes and heroines often tempt fate, remain
or go when good sense cautions the opposite. There’s the famous line the Russian-Fairy-Tale-Ivan
answers to Baba Yaga’s terrifying question, “Were you forced to come or did you
come of your own free will?” The correct answer is “Both.” If not before, then certainly after she is a
survivor, after she had answered the call, each heroine—dare I say, each poet, writer,
mother, wife, et. al.—must decide if she will continue “to look up straight /
into whatever warms [her].” TWICE is a
good example of how Maddox takes tragic or quirky headlines, and invites her
reader to reflect on what they represent when considered from a meta-perspective.
~
Loring’s “Curse the Rainbow” also recounts a thunder and lightning
storm. “Curse” is almost a concrete poem, in that the lines flash about, much
as lightning bolts would, until the poem resolves and the last four stanzas
settle down. The images are reminiscent
of combat and war: “the sky brightens,” “children flee… / after scattered
horses,” “mist…blurs your face/criss-crosses your eyes,” “[y]our plea through
distant thunder.” “[L]ightning /
strikes” and “pounding memory / darts/ among / the branches.” And then the
flashback: “that girl /who still runs from her burning skin.” Even the wife’s response is full of war
imagery: “blood red sunset,” I “damn the
storm, the barbed wire between us, / want to scrape napalm / into your memory /
to ease your pain.” How bad must the
pain be if napalm would feel better? How
desperate must a woman be to consider napalm a possible cure? How desperate was our government to douse
Vietnam with napalm? You get the
idea.
The next seven lines are full of despair and hopelessness. “[N]either your laughing children / nor my
patient love / can keep you / from this moment. // I wonder if I can go
on.” Again, the poem could end here, but
the poet, like the heroine she is hangs onto a thread of courage and determination,
and a vision of coming through the ordeal. The poem’s last lines, also cited
earlier, introduce the speaker’s resilience and devotion in the face of
challenges that would send many others packing.
Still the sky clears, our bed stays warm,
~~
The Underworld: You might
well object, “Have we not already been mucking around in the underworld? It sure feels like it.” True, the tone of the poems has gotten
dark. But the underworld implies surrender,
a dying to all one has clung to for a sense of self and place in the world, and
our previous poems ended on hopeful notes.
Hope is false in the underworld, even if we pray desperately for it to
not be so. It is important to not conflate the heroine’s journey underworld
with any religious conceptions of hell as a place of punishment for wrong doers. It is an all too neutral place of darkness
where the heroine realizes that cherished formulas for a good, happy life do
not guarantee that life. The gods and fate are fickle.
~
Loring’s poems “Forward” begins, as many of hers do, with a homely
task—this time cleaning the china cabinet.
Two items set the course of the poem.
First there is the tea set her aunt sent from Japan, when her aunt “was
young / and thought a crisp salute / was the only price she’d pay / for her
freedom.” A sentimentally archaic image
for an archaically naive belief. Next
the poet reaches “back into my yesterdays / to other teas and services,”
specifically her wedding with its “forgotten …vows and promises.” This is a very ambiguous line. What kind of
forgetting is recalled? The words of the
ceremony, or has the spirit of the words been forgotten in the reality of her
marriage? She continues her chore—in her
dining room and in the poem. "[I] unwrap the porcelain bride and groom / who stood guard for us in frosting, / touch the bride's cold cheek / follow her lace bodice to her band, // the groom's left are, waiting, / trace the tear-drop beads / painted on her graying gown / wipe dust from her eyes."
Like the rich poem it is, “Forward” presents us with a simple story even as its
images entangle us in multiple levels of meaning: from “forgotten wedding vows
and promises,” to enduring porcelain that “stood guard” over dreams as insubstantial
as frosting, to cold cheeks (no longer warm in the flush of romantic love), to
“tear-drop beads.” All these images tell
us of romantic love, tarnished by war, and tested by years. Romantic notions, which the poet has tried carefully
to hold onto along with the other fragile treasures from her earlier life, have
proved misleading. They have not stood
the test of time. When she wipes the
dust from the statuette’s eyes, she wipes the dust from her own eyes which
“look through the pane / of the still-open door.” Leaving remains an option. The door is
“still-open.” She could leave this heroine’s
journey with its trials, try for a simpler, more ordinary life. Instead, she watches her “aproned reflection,
// move goblets to hide the groom.” She
stays, but she “buries” the notion of the romantic handsome groom and what, for
her, has become a fairy tale version of marriage marketed by the wedding
industry. As the marital enrichment
movement folks maintain, a wedding does not a marriage make. The wife in this poem has accepted her
consignment to the underworld that is her marriage. She has surrendered to her fate, which does
not include the kind of marriage she hoped for as a young bride.
~
Even if you have never driven through dead and dying mining towns
around the world, a careful reading of Maddox’s poem, “Minersville Diner,” will
give you a good sense of the barrenness the industry creates, and the even
greater despair it leaves behind once it has exploited the people and the
land’s resources. It represents the
underbelly of the good life most people seek.
It is a manmade underworld which I visited many times when I was a
consulting occupational health nurse with the National Institute of
Occupational Health and Safety (now defunct).
People not relegated to life in dead company towns, even if they
are visiting family rooted there, are always and only “[e]n route to somewhere
else,” someplace implicitly better. They
are uneasy with the stark surroundings, at once stifled and titillated by the
intensity and dramatic despair of the place.
Yet, the place is paradoxically
somehow more invigorating than the suburban “dust of who-walked-out-on- whom,/
… our [own] abandoned mines of what is worse / than flipping fried eggs
alone.” The tone of the poem reminds me
of when, as a nursing student struggling with my own late adolescent
depression, I would find perspective and a new energy for life when faced with
the suffering of patients in the inner city teaching hospitals. There is a hierarchy to suffering, which does
not negate the fact that no suffering feels inconsequential when we are in the
middle of it. A visit to the Minersville Diner hits us over the head with the
fact that, despite what corporate America and Madison Avenue tells us, the
American dream does not guarantee “the good life” or freedom from painful
experiences.
The poet’s image of the hot, cracked sidewalks before the diner
takes us to the tenacity humans display when faced with surrendering to the
vagaries of the underworld. As we
should, we plan and scheme, and try with all our might to create a better life
for ourselves and our loved ones for, “[w]ithout the planned gaps, / there’s be
a hundred tiny fractures / in concrete, breaking more / than mothers’
backs.” We care for ourselves and each
other with restaurants and bakeries, “‘Coming soon!’” We build churches to protect us from the fickleness
of fate, to find peace with our place in things. Yet, even with the “blue dome of the church,
its painted god stars winking knowingly, … we pass into the life we [can only]
pretend is safe from explosion, from unexpected and total collapse.”
“Minersville Diner” recounts the speaker’s travels through and
respect for the underworld, rather than her personal time served in that
forsaken place. But her astute
observations of the reality and how it lies in wait for each of us, make it
quite clear that she is no stranger to its existential realities. In this poem the speaker serves as something
of an experienced mentor or guide, for those who would dare undertake the
heroine’s journey.
~~
Return/Rebirth: The most stripped down description of the archetypal
cycle is life, death, and rebirth. Not
all heroes and heroines complete the cycle.
In myth, fairy tales and stories, the rebirth or resurrection represents
the climax of the story. The denouement,
or the resolution, of the story involves the heroine’s successful return with
the treasure or elixir of life, etc. The return is often the step most
difficult to accomplish. The next two poems place the poet on the cusp of
rebirth, on the lip of the birth canal.
Their creations, including the books under review, are proof that they
got the treasure back to the ordinary world, which is forever changed as a
result.
~
Interestingly, winter storms figure in both “The Nor’easter” by
Loring and “Ithaca Winter” by Maddox.
What better image of death and the underworld than winter, and its accompanying
frozenness, death, burial under mounds of snow?
In its eight lines, “The Nor’easter” “helps focus survival thoughts / empties my
head of inside things." All her other
troubles are small compared to life or death situations, be they literal or
figurative. When you are in the
underworld, your every thought is for survival and return to the living. Next is the “swirl of stripped leaves, / whip
of limbs, /the pelt of rain,” all classic images of internal turmoil as well as
external storms. Still, the poet fears the next step, the sacrifices demanded
if she is to be released from the stormy underworld of her war torn life.
The heroine writes, “I latch shutters, / resist the howling / of
what wants out.” Is she caught in her
fear of the next step, the sacrifices required to be released from the
underworld of her war torn life? Is she
refusing to leave a dangerous situation that someone, not so foolish, would
walk away from? Or is she simply closing
the shutters in order to seal herself in an alchemical container? We have only to read the last three lines
together to find the answer: “resist the howling / of what wants out / on
paper.”
The line breaks in “Nor’easter,” especially in the last two
stanzas allow for multiple readings and create tiered meanings. As is her way, Loring creates depths of
meaning through the intensity and intensely personal nature of her
imagery. She is not a mere confessional poet, nor are her
descriptions of violence in any way gratuitous.
They are her lived experience and the lived experience of thousands of
family members in love and relationship with men and women who served in the
combat theaters of our nation’s wars, even when our political leaders sent them
to fight in questionable conflicts. Loring’s writing gives us profound, skillful,
and poignant documents about the challenges of not simply surviving, but also
redeeming, combat related traumas through the creative process.
~
“Ithaca Winter” by Maddox, is about a woman who goes into a winter
storm to “undo who I was.” To let the wind “[unzip] / eventually what isn’t.”
To let the snow “white-out absence,/ lost the clean slate entirely.” The last is an extremely stark image of wished-for
self-annihilation. Until the penultimate
stanza the poem consists of a beautifully lyrical, yet rather one-dimensional
narrative about an existential crisis of some sort. The speaker is in so much pain she almost
wishes for death in the underworld.
Then, the first line of the penultimate stanza catapults us out of
sequential time and narrative. “I had a
life disappear once.” When was once? Just before the events of the previous
four stanzas, or another time? The rest
of the stanza leaves me wondering. “I
stepped out if it into the snow / …an old name and sorrow / stuck at the bottom
in a drift.” Did the life disappear or
did she leave it behind? The life or the
disappeared life? Are they the same?
This poem makes the reader work hard. It’s a good thing the language is so
beautiful. A definite but only implied
shift occurs into the last stanza. The
shift is reminiscent of a major scene change in cinema or TV. We aren’t prepared for the shift but, if we
pay attention to details, we realize we are in a different setting. “When I stopped shivering, behind my teeth
were words.” If the speaker stopped
shivering, then she either froze to death, or she came in from the cold. My vote?
She came out of her winter underworld, out of its cold. But while her
teeth chattered in the cold, they tapped out, quite musically in this poem, the
words that now fill her mouth and, implicitly, wait to be—or have been—put to
paper.
~
As a last
point, let’s consider the imagery, explicit and implied, of the color white in
these last two poems. In Western culture, white is most often a symbol of new
life, rebirth. And the color white works
this way in both these poems.
In the third stanza of ‘Ithaca Winter,” Maddox creates a very
paradoxical and idiosyncratic list of the
symbolic qualities of snow. This she follows with a question which forms the
fourth stanza. “What better white/ to
white-out absence, lose the clean slate entirely?” After more snow imagery in
stanza five, the last stanza reads, “When I stopped shivering, / behind my
teeth were words.” Here, the poet
implies, rather than represents, the white piece of paper upon which she will
write of her journey. And she implies it
with another white object—her teeth, which she sinks into the telling of her
heroine stories in her prolific writing.
While Loring cites “pelts of rain” rather than images of snow, the
title “Nor’easter” conjures a winter storm which, for me, suggests snow. In fact, until I started my careful
re-readings for this review, my mind substituted images of “snow” for
“rain.” Be that as it may, the poem
starts with a Nor’easter, a winter storm, and ends with “what wants out,” i.e. words,
“on paper.” Paper, the blank white page,
is virginal, as all mythological heroines are when they are reborn. The blank
page waits for the poet to pen the story of her journey with the treasures she’s
brought back to benefit her world.
~~
Those of us fortunate enough to never have had violence/tragedy,
and their aftermath, intrude first hand into our lives have little reason to
deeply contemplate how it—and our denial of it— impacts our families and society.
And it is not only war or school shootings in suburban schools that
scream for attention. The poor, the
ethnically, religious, and racially disenfranchised in America and the world,
civilians in war torn areas, imprisoned and/or displaced people around the
world—these and others live daily with suffering caused by violence and class
related tragedies . We can easily be overwhelmed with the weight of it all. And
yet, even if we don’t live in such conditions, or go to war, or love someone
who has, most of us watch the evening news, as well as movies and TV shows
about war, tragedies, danger and heroism.
Maddox and Loring, in their resilient poems, redeem our often macabre
fascination in their poems. They debunk
feel good feature stories, and digest headlined and personal experiences of the
sequela of violence and tragedy. Their
poems serve up their reflections, invite readers to ingest the bitter as well
as the sweet offerings on the table. In
this way, they cull some redemption out of otherwise senseless happenings.
Veterans and their families are, and are not, terribly different
from other Americans. They, like others, including many poets and the disenfranchised
featured in the headlines Maddox contemplates, know that suffering cannot be
avoided. They have joined the ranks of
those who know it is difficult, if not impossible, to bargain with the gods. They
know that feeling betrayed when the gods are erratic in their regard for human
welfare is self-deluding, however understandable. Marion Woodman insists that we can suffer
neurotically, or we can suffer redemptively, the latter a requirement for living
more consciously. Loring and Maddox are resilient women and poets of witness
who write about that which many would rather not see. They give voice to the unspoken, some would
say the unspeakable. In the process they
contribute to the redemption of the suffering that motivated their writing. Their
two quite different books share deep truths, and give voice to shunned, yet
compelling, human experiences, with compassion, and without swinging a
political ax.
Caroline LeBlanc, MFA, MS, RN is Writer in Residence at the Museum
of the American Military Family. Presently she is co-producer/writer for Telling, Albuquerque, (part of the
national Telling Project) a 9/11/2104 testimonial theatrical event where
military veterans and family members perform their own stories. In 2014 she directed 4 Voices on the 4th, a collaborative spoken word
performance with three other women military family members. Since relocating to Albuquerque in 2013, she
has hosted a writing salon for women military veterans and family members. In 2011 Spalding University awarded her an
MFA in Creative Writing. Her poems have
been published in her 2010 chapbook, Smoky
Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle, as well as online and in a number of print
journals. Her art pieces have also been
included in a number of group shows in the Albuquerque area.
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