This River, JUDY HOGAN’S NEW POETRY BOOK DUE OUT DECEMBER 1. from Wild Embers Press of Oregon under their Watersongs Imprint.
http://watersongsbooks.blogspot.com/2014/10/fall-list-of-authors.html
This
River may be ordered from Judy Hogan, PO Box 253, Moncure, NC 27559 for
$15, to pick up, or $18 to be mailed. If you order two copies,
it's $30 to pick up and $33 to be mailed. Pre-orders active from
October 20, ready to ship in early November.
Early reviewer comments: "This River
holds our hands up to the magic in the dark moon with figurative
language that pulls shards of tenderness from a world that is bloody
with sting of sunlit longing and a psychic quest for redemption. These
poems resurrect an ancient enchanted necklace worn by a herstorical
aching that Judy Hogan bears into utterance.
“This collection is a meditation on time, memory, and the fleeting
nature of life. Decoding the threads of aching and the heart of
the language of two separate rivers is at the core of This River. These poems are a beautiful terrain forming the powerful backdrop for the magnificence of fragility.
“Part primordial, part philosophical, powerful story inhabiting fluid
boundaries between hearts, breaking the pedestrian parameters of space,
time, and sensory experiences…. This River is a lesson for weaving the baskets that are needed for carrying water to the Light." --Jaki Shelton Green, poet, Feeding the Light, North Carolina 2014 Literary Hall of Fame.
***
In This River
the speaker’s observations of nature are liquid with impassioned drive.
The phrases in this poem are smooth flowing, and this fluency in
language seems a reflection of the river where she studies and
meditates. Each eddy, and bird, and leaf is clearly drawn and
vital to the sense of place and self. Identities of the self and
qualities of desire are pulled into her observations and
transformations and move us as the river moves. --Foster Foreman, Poet (Soundings) and Co-Editor of Hyperion Poetry Journal and Thorp Springs Press.
***
In This River,
Judy Hogan takes paths forged by Proust and Virginia Woolf down and in
to the deepest most nuanced passages of the soul. Using a great
Piedmont river as matter, metaphor, and muse she shows one woman’s
transcendent journey beyond vulnerability to a place of abiding grace.
This River is not only beautiful poetry, but a compelling story as
well. --Joanie McLean, Poet (Place and Up From Dust)
From the preface by Judy Hogan:
“When I left Kostroma after my first Sister Cities of Durham visit in
1990, my host, Mikhail, and I had the mayor’s blessing to start
exchange visits between our writers, and I had also fallen in love with
this man who opened Russian culture to me and seemed my equal and my
soul-mate in all the ways that mattered. I could tell that he
loved me, too, but would never leave his wife and his sons. As we
waited for our train back to Moscow, Mikhail said, ‘One day, Judy, we
will each have a wing and we’ll fly somewhere together.’
“Perhaps it was the largest passion of my life, after my desire to
write. It is the time, however, to share this whole story.
May it illumine other souls as it did ours.”
Readings in the Triangle area include:
January 10, 2015 Book signing at Paperbacks Plus, Siler City, Pat Dawson, Saturday–11-1 PM.
January 21, 7 PM (Wed), Reading at Regulator Bookshop (Durham) with Jaki S. Green.
January 27, 7 PM, (Tues), Reading at South Regional Library (Durham)
March 11, Wed. 7 PM Chatham Community Library, Pittsboro, with Jaki S. Green.
March 24, Tues, Goldsboro. Details to be announced.
April 9, Thurs, 7 PM. Reading at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, with a second poet.
Contact: judyhogan@mindspring.com http://postmenopausalzest.blogspot.com www.wildembers.com
http://watersongsbooks.blogspot.com
***
From 2013:
Beaver Soul. Judy
Hogan. Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY. $12.
Chapbook. May be ordered from finishinglinepress.com $12 plus $3 postage. Or send a check to Finishing Line
Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, KY, 40324. From Judy: $13 to pick up. $15 to mail.
ISBN: 978-1-62229-324-7
Publication date: October 1, 2013.
Beaver Soul is Judy Hogan’s love song for Russia. The poems begin along the shore of the Haw River, and move to Russia.Judy’s
writings about the natural world use metaphors as a way of exploding
the bounds of perception. Her poems are informational,
compressing experiences, and continue over a span of thirty years to
help us see the likenesses between systems of human, plant,
animal, and celestial worlds. Judy teaches us how to use
our poet eyes, how to guide us to truths beyond the scientific way of
seeing, weighing, measuring, abstraction, and dissection. –Jaki S.
Green, 2003 winner of the North Carolina Award, 2009 Piedmont Poet
Laureate
These
are love poems. The heroine-hero is the Earth. In this way,
Judy Hogan’s poems remind me of Thoreau’s journals. Like Thoreau,
she is a natural-born lover of anything that grows, anything original,
most particularly the earth that looks after itself continually... You
hear Emerson’s world in the background, that yearning to transcend the
self. To do this the poet must keep open house to the
world. So Judy Hogan writes within the romantic
sensibility. She is a passion child. Her structure is the
old and classical kingdom’s.
--Shelby Stephenson, Playing Dead and Play My Music Anyhow, Finishing Line Press.
Judy
continually weaves the golden thread of her lyric meditation and her
philosophical comprehension of nature, its creatures, and people, into
the fabric of her observations. Her own soul in her poems is
associated with the image of the beaver–a builder, patient and
persistent in its work and in taking care of its family. And
everything that takes place in the beaver’s life–its joys and sorrows,
its misfortunes and successes–corresponds to events in her own
life. The motto of Judy Hogan is creating and overcoming.
–Nonna Slepakova, Russian translator of Beaver Soul
Review of Judy Hogan’s chapbook, Beaver Soul by Sharon Ewing:
These
poems should be read slowly and savored. Beaver Soul is a collection of
meditations evoked by a closely observed world of nature ranging from
the Haw River in North Carolina to the Russian countryside of Kostroma,
and ending on the banks of the River Teign in Devon, England. Through a
seamless blending of the language of metaphor with the descriptive
language of the empirical natural world, the poet discovers and shares
with us her insights. She both shows and tells us of her journey. The
opening line of the first poem (This River 6) launches us into both
worlds with a simile: Memories are like fish. The page is dotted with
abstract words, with concepts: Love, Belief, Truth, but the poet
grapples with her demand for proofs and finds in her observation of the
beaver’s life, evidence that satisfies a trusting heart. The poem
shifts seamlessly from natural descriptions of the beaver’s work, from
observations of “bites of wood and bark,” and distinguishing “pale
orange of fresh wood from the gray” to a “she” who “can build a whole
world on one sentence she almost didn’t/hear.” The poet has moved us
from observing the beaver to seeing into the inner life of the
poet.
By
the third poem, (Beaver Soul 1) the poet identifies her spirit with
“this beaver who understands the river,/ not perfectly but in all ways
that/ matter. I’ve inherited, by long study,/ her beaver soul.” The
following poem, (Beaver Soul 6) is prefaced by a Russian proverb: “When
trouble arrives, open the gates.” And the poet does indeed open the
gate, she lets her terror go, accepts the mud as well as the Light of
spring; and, as she watches, the mud settles deeper as turtles swim
upward to “the sun-warmed air” and with shells “still loggy with cold.
. . bathe in sun.” Then, in a Miltonian extended metaphor, these
sunbathing turtles become a flotilla of “the unwardoffable Greeks. . .
come again to retrieve Helen.” We are suddenly in Homer’s world, and
the poet knows “Light is on their side, but they will suffer this time
too.” And she knows that if she wants, like Homer, to “sing words that
can call old turtles up . . . wake up throaty peepers . . . and soothe
the ache/ in branches still alive, which ice has cruelly snapped and
left for dead,” she must “Remember: the world is/ nothing else. Just
mud and light.” And by the next poem, (Beaver Soul 8), she has, by “The
power of one yellow narcissus on a cold spring Sunday afternoon,” moved
from the dark brown of the dead of winter to the promise of the
resurrection of spring.
As
the poet identifies her spirit with the beaver, her Beaver Soul, she
moves to a greater understanding of the Russian concept of “soul” as
her friendships with Russians develop long-distance through letters,
and by mid-summer (Beaver Soul 15), she is in Russia, falling in love
with Russian fields, meadows, and people: “I sleep in a Russian field.
. . . Russia is mine. Nothing/ can take my peacefulness away. . . My
soul comes to rest. The meadow welcomes/ me now because the people
here/ have tugged the heavy gate that/ was between us open. . . . Our
fears have retreated. . . We find all the words we want. And our eyes/
say the rest. Our language is/ the only human one.”