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Heart of the Garfish
Very good in glossy illustrated wrappers. First edition - First printing, a trade paperback, issued simultaneously with hardcover. Her first book, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
- GenresPoetry
44 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1982
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March 4, 2013
Kathy's poetry is honest, vivid, brilliant and memorable. I love her redhanded farmers who "installed cut isinglass on parlor doors," their wives with spoon-at-a-time Oneida, their old china with web-fine cracks. Young readers may have to search the internet to understand that Depression era wives stocked their kitchen with grocery store promotional items. Today's consumers may have no grasp of acquiring china or silverware one item at a time, one week at a time. But Callaway's poetry evokes so much more than the time and place of our pioneering Midwest ancestors. The epic sweep of her verse carries us to the time of Montezuma and Cortez; to Madrid, Paris, and Maharani's summer palace and the Bay of Bengal.
I'm smitten with Callaway's regional references and the power of her images. The Nebraska farmer whose face is "God-red from the sickle of the sky" bends over wheat stalks, he and his wife "like illustrated figures from the Bible." The weather is a god in its own right in the farmer's world, and nothing says it better than "the sky slapped hard with its one hand," and "rain-tines spiked the darkening fields." No sentimental, gentle landscapes rule Callaway's view of the Great Plains, so eloquently captured with a single image: "that door in the ground," the root cellar, where sturdy pioneers who plowed the plains would hide from the fury of the twister, and cows and boars whirled by on hay bales. My favorite line: "Weather could enter you, the way spiked rods pulled down lightning, the planet unraveling."
Without quoting line after great line of Callaway's earthy, impassioned poems, I cannot find enough ways to praise them. To me, she ranks with poet Rod Usher and with the former poet laureate of Nebraska, Ted Kooser. Callaway deserves far more recognition and readership.
I'm smitten with Callaway's regional references and the power of her images. The Nebraska farmer whose face is "God-red from the sickle of the sky" bends over wheat stalks, he and his wife "like illustrated figures from the Bible." The weather is a god in its own right in the farmer's world, and nothing says it better than "the sky slapped hard with its one hand," and "rain-tines spiked the darkening fields." No sentimental, gentle landscapes rule Callaway's view of the Great Plains, so eloquently captured with a single image: "that door in the ground," the root cellar, where sturdy pioneers who plowed the plains would hide from the fury of the twister, and cows and boars whirled by on hay bales. My favorite line: "Weather could enter you, the way spiked rods pulled down lightning, the planet unraveling."
Without quoting line after great line of Callaway's earthy, impassioned poems, I cannot find enough ways to praise them. To me, she ranks with poet Rod Usher and with the former poet laureate of Nebraska, Ted Kooser. Callaway deserves far more recognition and readership.
Displaying 1 of 1 review