Hand-stitched chapbook.
Six Dollars.
TO
ORDER North American Song Line ON-LINE |
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| The Australian Outback is
a beautiful but unforgiving landscape. With no written language, how
did the Aborigine people map their environment? The solution was song
lines: a narrative that embedded human history into the land itself.
If you want to cross from A to B, you tell yourself the song line
that corresponds to that route and if your story and the landscape
match up as you go along, you know you have not lost your way. I loved
the possibilities of that idea, the way it intertwined narrative with
the material world and made visible our interconnection with our landscape.
I decided to write a long poem that would be a kind of listening to
the land I'd lived on, at that time, for twenty five years. North
American Song Line is the result of that listening. |
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It
is one thing to turn a bright and self-contained lyric; it is quite
another to undertake philosophical, historical, even socio-political
concerns in a poem that ranges from the first settlements in the Susquehanna
Valley to the ovens of Treblinka, from the cry of the screech owl
to the history of the gypsy moth, from radical prejudice to the musings
on DNA. I am very impressed by her willingness to take on a big subject
matter, to experiment with shaped structures on the page, and to marry
metaphor to meaning.
0000000000000000000000000000 Maxine Kumin
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