Book of the Week

Arrival (Sheila Na Gig 2023)

by Cynthia Anderson

  

Review by Sharon Waller Knutson

As a fellow desert dweller, nature lover and fond of fables, I was entranced by Cynthia Anderson’s magical and mythical poetry collection, “Arrival,” which takes me on a sensual visual journey through the landscape and seascape of places real and imagined including the Mohave Desert where she lives, Sedona, where her grandparents lived  and Iceland where she longs to visit.

Like a videographer for National Geographics, she shows me a bear “just before it bounds into a berry parch,” two white wolverines being slaughtered by hunters, a hummingbird fanning her wings, a giant white salamander, a delirious black bee, an orange spider “big as a cat’s eye,” a young buck with no fear, a mockingbird singing the night into myth, blue beetles “in the woods’” and a bird and fish that “fall in love” and turn into a sea turtle.

Cynthia drew me into each section with these tantalizing titles:

1: The Face of the World

Golden Torch, The Spinner, Angry Stone, This Morning in the Foothills, Becoming Sequoia, The Thing with Feathers and The Shallows Companion.

 II: Mapless

 Seal Man, Neolithic Girl, Cosmic Soup, A Long Goodbye and Invoking the Salamander

III: Mercy Seat

Ode to a Pear, Doctor, My Eyes, Mourning the Doves, Escape Needed Elsewhere, The Last of Their Kind, Overnight at White Pocket Trail, Gideon’s Bluff, Worlds Apart and This Changes Everything.

She spins spectacular stories in these powerful poems:

Grandmother Returns to Sedona Through My Eyes

The mountains breathe
their trees lean against me—

My eyes see what
your eyes saw
you slip quietly into me—

You turn my head
and I remember
what you remember—

the red rocks
the ponderosa pines
the rush of water—

the sudden stroke
that broke your dream
of being an artist—

twenty-two years
in nursing homes
how you gripped my hand—

Tonight you take me down
the steep-sided canyon
to stand by the singing stream.

And this morning I pull
a single black hair
from my brown head.

 
Neolithic Girl

Stone whisperer
finds human life
too fragile
for her liking

no farm or hut
can claim her

She prefers
a hardened skin
slips in and out
of stone-life

    rattles strung
with tooth and claw

holds parlays
with sarsens
who journey far
then stand upright
    
gathering
on grassy plains

solstice night
starlight helps her
move through time
fold it forward

    she sees her future
fallen
 

Alcyone Retold

Daughter of the wind-king,
she learned young how quickly
dead calm can turn to raging fury.

Winter brought storms, tore the sea,
flung towers of spray on the beach,
knocked her off her feet, nearly

dragging her under. She never forgot
that power. When she wed the son
of the morning star, sweet peace—

but in the depths, her charmed
existence churned like breaking water.
Her mate insisted on setting sail

to consult the oracle of Apollo,
sure no god would let him drown.
He ignored her warnings, left her

on shore to watch his ship drop
below the horizon. The shock
when he washed up at her feet

turned her into a kingfisher.
Inconsolable, she folded him
in her wings, kissed him with

her beak—a devotion that remade
him in her likeness, though she
claimed the brighter blue.

It was she who chose to nest
on the waves, taming them
so her young could hatch,

and so other lovers might pass
those straits unharmed.

 
River Daisies, River Geese

They always come back, she says.
Right to this spot.
The bank gleams with snowy petals.
He loves me, he loves me not.

Daisies fall from her hands
as the geese pass overhead.

She leaves her travail behind,
buys a ticket across the sea.
She has never seen so much sun.

She has lived long enough
to be unreasonably wanted
by someone.

She brings back a story to tell
these long winter nights:

My true love stood
on the green bank
and all that is ugly in life
flew south...

She walks or they walk together
along the river in her mind—

And the flowers say
what they always say,
We are here for the taking—

And the water waves
goodbye over rocks—
unlike the calm she came for,
a song to steal her heart.


Read More about Cynthia on this site.

https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/07/storyteller-of-week.html

Buy the book at:

https://sheilanagigblog.com/sheila-na-gig-editions-quick-shopping/cynthia-anderson2/

www.cynthiandersonpoet.com