****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
With strength, honesty and her own brand of rough beauty, Judith Minty pours an intimate understanding of the earth, as well of what lies above and beneath it, into this artfully assembled volume linked with images of "the bear," both visual and linguistic.The poet confirms her role as a unique voice of the Midwest, speaking powerfully for all regions to hear.In this collection, Minty adds 20 new poems to selections from three previous collections--Lake Songs and Other Fears, In the Presence of Mothers and Dancing the Fault--and from three chapbooks--12 Letters to My Daughters, Yellow Dog Journal and Counting the Lossses. The new and selected collection that emerges is a book to treasure, to read and re-read.Minty is no mere "nature poet," nor is she a regionalist, although the lake country of Michigan inhabits, or haunts, many of the poems. She also writes of California with its mysterious gray whales, earthquakes, rainstorms and giant trees. No matter where she is, Minty is a poet of the ancient elements of earth, fire, water and air. As skillfully as she describes the attraction-replusion of nature, she also reveals the magnetism between mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, tugging the reader's own buried memories and bringing them to the surface.Minty deserves the many awards she has won, and now she merits even more attention beyond the midwest from coast to coast.
