GALATEA RESURRECTS #5 (A Poetry Engagement)

SEEDPODS by GLENNA LUSCHEI

HUGH FOX Reviews

Seedpods by Glenna Luschei
(Presa:S:Press, 2006, Rockford, Ml)

How magnificently refreshing to enter into a world without presidents and wars, gangs, rockets, disease, institutionalized religions...a world made up totally of re-creations and meditations of Nature itself, in all its totality:

Winter is shedding her skin.
The last thin
snow is a cobweb
in the eaves.

Your love
is threading my ribs.
Free as a spider
1 glide to you.

See the sun
through the fingers of trees
This is the church.
This is the steeple
These are the lilies at the edge of spring!
("This is the Church," p. 32)

Huge buddhistic influences here, yes, and also Luschei's immersion in Portuguese-Brazilian literature and the Portuguese-Brazilian philosophy of ecstatically glorying in The Now.

There are poems about night crawlers, feeding fish by flashlight, rain in the Andes, mountain lions, racoons and hummingbirds, birches, Santa Ana storms....and always mystic little touches that adroitly refer back to major philosophies/world-views that form the basis for her visions.Like in the poem "The Cardinal" where you almost miss the reference to kabbala unless your're a very attentive reader aware of the seeds that Luschei is always sowing:

North Carolina house sculpted in snow
the cardinal, hot as a cinder
burns out his alphabet in the icy drive.

Yes!
craving new letters for January
I scrape my kabbala onto the windshield....
("The Cardinal," p. 16)

Luschei isn't merely a poet but a subtle impressionistic prophet whose work immediately begins to change your whole world-view.

*****

Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, has some 86 books published, BUT HIS MOST IMPORTANT WORK STILL REMAINS UNPUBLISHED, ESPECIALLY HIS MAJOR NOVELS. A book of his plays is coming out in 2007, as is his fantasy novel Voyage to the House of Yama and a book of poetry from Higganum Hill Press. His autobiography, Way, Way Off the Road was just published by Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, Massachusetts.

posted by na @ 10:00 PM