Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems

by Sheryl St. Germain

In this retrospective collection, Sheryl St. Germain sings of her New Orleans upbringing, the Cajun/Creole culture, and the struggles of being a woman in a decaying culture.

Genres: Poetry

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this collection after reading the author's wonderful essay-memoir Swamp Songs. Many of the poems here cover the same themes found in that work, even using the same imagery, but I didn't mind at all revisiting them in a different form. And while for the most part, I preferred the prose of Swamp Songs, there was a poem about the too-fertile wisteria in her mother's backyard that I liked even better than its corresponding essay.

When I reviewed Swamp Songs about 3 weeks ago, I neglected to mentioned how big of a part food plays in it, including a wonderful description of how to make gumbo. Of course, I know how to make gumbo, but her description gave me such a craving for it that I've eaten it 3 times in 3 different restaurants since. The 'roux' in the title of this collection ends up not only referring to the base/thickener for this dish, but for the 'base' (foundation/home/family etc) that makes us who we are.

Though this area has made her who she is, she doesn't just write of the New Orleans area. She's lived in the Midwest for most of her adult life and there are poems addressed to that experience as well, including a great one about a snowstorm.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intense and sensual collection of selected and new poems from a Pittsburgh-based writer who draws heavily on her formative years in Louisiana. Earthy and accessible.

[Jean Lamberty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection of St. Germain's poems that spans her career. She is moving towards prose poems.

[Carolyne Mistake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark and horrific and sexy. Natural and cruel and empathetic. Poems of grit and longing.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Orleans is a character throughout this book, which is a selected volume spanning from 1987 to 2007. The subject matter, all related to St. Germain's cajun upbringing, spans from poems that seem to express ambivalent homesickness to processing first-family tragedies/dysfunction to joyful passion, motherhood--and more tragedy. The person revealed through the course of the poems is one who does not flinch from people's flaws but rather has the generosity to love them anyway. Thus the book, as put together from the books throughout St. Germain's career to this point, has a loose narrative arc that I think most people can relate to as stages of life we go through even if the particulars are much different in each person's case. St. Germain comes across as someone very resilient and likeable.

Here is the last 3rd of "Hacking Away the Wisteria":

I plant it
as if it were a piece of my mother,
as if it were a piece of my father,
as if it were my mother's slow death.
my father's gangrenous leg, his shriveled liver,
and I watch daily to see
if it's taken root,
I imagine it in my dreams,
the first push of new root into
soft fresh soil, moist with waiting, wildness

wisdom, weeping, wickedness,
word, woman, wish, welt, wailing,
wanting, withdrawing, wet, within,
whip, willful, willing, wind, there is

no wisteria in me, no wisteria
there is nothing
my son will have to hack out.

[Octavio Solis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection well over ten years old now, but the poems of my friend Sheryl still carry a live charge, a strong sexual charge in every line, even as she deals with grief, trouble, loss and betrayal. She understands the erotic charge of death and dives deep into her body to learn it. She's a body poet, embracing her own first, then the world's. She evokes her New Orleans in many of these poems and weds that city's luminous air with the classical Medusa, but she also finds lyric significance in the snowfall of her new adopted East Coast home. Completely unafraid of the truth of her life, sharing the vagaries of love, marriage and motherhood with painful honesty. Her sensuous delight in the making of her roux calls up the hands of her mother and grandmother before her, but that delight elicits its opposite, its homonym, rue. Wondrous, easy language with so much life beneath.

[Sarah Lada · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark, but not by the lack-of-light definition. Bean-skin dark. Sun-hyde dark. The dark, mushroom taste of a man. The dark one finds in old, clotted blood. The dark one finds in a muck-mangled lake. Dirty-nail dark. Gritty with longing and every variety of sweat, this book of poetry dips into selected poems, ghosts of former books, and rises in the end with poems, fresh with ash on their shoulders.

[Tim Genetti]

Edward Hirsch

[Abi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t remember how I discovered this book. I’d never read a Sheryl St. Germain poem before I found this. In fact, I’d never heard of her. However it happened, I’m glad it did because her poetry is incredible. There are some lines that are still nestled inside my chest as I’m writing this review. And it’s not often I’ll dog-ear a book or annotate it, but I did this one because I had to mark off which poems I read and then had to sit a minute and digest and then read again and again... Read the full review here

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew the author very well back in the 70's and 80's, so these selections bring back a lot of fond memories of a very turbulent time in my (and probably most of my generation's) life. Beautiful, yet often painful to read, Sheryl doesn't touch your heart, she gives it a pinch. Magnificent portraits of familial relationships, surreal Louisiana customs, and life in general.

[Sheri Fresonke Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let it Be a Dark Roux features poems set in Louisiana with a rich vocabulary of place, culture, and the poet's life growing up in an area noted for sex, drugs, partying. The family connections are woven in and around what Louisiana is like. They are very interesting personal poems with hints of sensuality.

[Charlotte Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raunchy, heartbreaking, funny. I'm in love with this woman.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

read three sections:

Going Home, Making Bread at Midnight, & How Heavy the Breath of God.

Some amazing poems. My favorite section was How Heavy the Breath of God.

[Pele Thorncastle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing poetry, brilliant author