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Written by Virginia Freedman
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Thursday, 28 August 2008 00:42 |
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 The Memory of Gills", by Catherine Carter, LSU Press, 2006, ISBN
978-0-8071-3176-3 (PAPER) is a 72-page book of poems. On the jacket,
R.H.W. Dillard wrote,
"Catherine Carter's first volume of poetry exudes a genuinely classical
quality-cool-eyed and clear-eyed, intelligent, unsentimental,
self-aware, and witty in the fullest and best sense. Carter takes our
evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for
remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us
feel both alien and alive. She writes of being "raised by wolves," that
"everyone marries into another species," and of "hearing things" in the
voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat,
sometimes-gallows humor-the poems' subjects range from roadkill to
stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the
road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, The Memory
of Gills nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are."
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