Diane Glancy

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Biographical note:  Diane Glancy is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches Native American Literature and Creative Writing. She was awarded a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the 2003 Juniper Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press for Primer of the Obsolete. Her recent collections of poetry are The Shadow’s Horse and The Relief of America. Her novels include Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Mask Maker and The Man Who Heard the Land.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710614
ISBN-10:  1844710610
ISBN-13:  9781844710614
Author:  Diane Glancy
Title:  Rooms
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  22-Apr-05
Extent:  168pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  252 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Rooms is a collection of new and selected poems by Diane Glancy. The rooms are spaces from previous collections – spaces influenced by memory and the pull of the past on the present. This collection of poems walks a line between balance and imbalance and struggles for an alignment of fragmented experiences. It tries to put into perspective the disparities of survival. It seeks to reconcile history and a broken heritage that results from a collision of cultures.

These poems, written from 1986-2004, include work from earlier collections, The Relief Of America, The Shadow's Horse, Stones For A Pillow, (Ado)Ration, Boom Town, Lone Dog’s Winter Count, Iron Woman, One Age In A Dream, Offering, and a chapbook, Coyote’s Quodlibet.

The title is taken from an idea, The Ames Room, which was a demonstration created by Dartmouth Professor Adelbert Ames in the 1940’s to show that we can look into an off-sided room, yet it will appear in proportion because the way we think something should be shapes our perception of it.

If the mind is a trickster shaping the misshapen into a familiar form and setting upright what has been turned on its side, what does a lopsided perception do? Does it skew what is not skewed? What if history, in this case, Native American history, has been turned on its side? How does the off-sided perception of the vanquished warp normal experience?

Rooms is a calling together of the tribes. These poems are a campground of voices in council.

Table of contents:
The Ordinary Shape of Rooms
The Ordinary Shape of Rooms
Asylum in the Grasslands
Buffalo Medicine
If I were to tell a story
Boarding School for Indian Women
Meatloaf
Asylum in the Grasslands
He Opens and Closes the Store
Fodder
Returning on an Oklahoma Backroad Late at Night with 139,000 Miles on my Car
The Relief of America
Christopher
Buffalo Jump, Blue Mounds, Minnesota
Oklahoma Land Run
Giving the Air Away
Cinnamon Bear, Field Museum, Chicago
The Shadow’s Horse
Tuning
Story
The Stockyard Series: Remuda
Crow Standing Rez
They Handed Out Bible Verses Like Oars
Driving
Words look for a place to belong
Stones for a Pillow
The Ladder
The Swimmer
A Cab Nowhere To Be Seen
Leonard de Vinci’s Monna Lisa dite La Joconde,
The Stones for a Pillow
Lone Dog’s Winter Count
Hamatawk
Lone Dog’s Winter Count
Portrait of the Artist as Indian
Here I Am Standing Beside Myself
Homework
Truck Stop on Highway 80 near Walcott, Iowa
Portrait of the Lone Survivor
Kemo Sabe
The First Reader, Santee Training School, 1873
Coyote’s Quodlibet
Coyote’s Shyness
Coyote Meets the Bird Maker
Coyote thinks of story as a living being
Coyote’s Skyness
Coyote’s Vision
(Ado)ration
You know the Indian
Homage
Buffalo Trip
You know them by their stealing
The light of (ado)ration
Well you push your mind along the road
Air for Flute Stop
Waves in the Fold of the Lake
(Ado)ration
Theology of Deer
One Age in a Dream
If Words Were Shapen in the Animal Head
Squirrels
Bride Means Cook
Pasture for Rent
Iron Woman
Without Title
Iron Woman
Aunt Fannie Fixes Bison Bourguignon
I Am Not the Woman I Am
Totem
First Lieutenant Marine
Plague
Boom Town
The Rain Stealer
A Share of the Stair (or As I’m Talking I’m Becoming What I Say)
Grand Portage Casino
Slipping into what will hold onto
Kissing the Sun
Wyoming
A condensation during flight
Offering
Great Great Grandmother Steps into the Room
Reservation
Solar Eclipse
The Spirit Blesses You w/ Hardship
Some Thoughts on Our Uncommon Language
Photo Frames #1-10, Kansas City Stockyards
(Or How to be Indian)
Rooms
House
Rooms

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Excerpt from book:  

Christopher

Here come Christopher Columbus comming ober t’ wabes.
PUFF. PUFF.
He think he come to the segund part of urth.
His shups bump inter land at night
y haze la senal dla cruz.
Hey Yndias. He say. HEY ERMERICA.
He brang glaz beads & bells.
Luego se ayunto alli mucha gente dla Isla.
We think he god from skie. Yup. Yup. Wedu.
The blue oshen sprad like a table napkin by his shups.
Como el por ante todos toma
va como de hecho tomo possession dla dha.
Yaz. He say. I take. Now whar find GOLD?
Our har like harsehair. He say.
He look our fish tooth on spears. HAR HAR. He laf.
Los reyes wand gold. Gloria religion xpiana.
Gloria Yndias. He say. Y load his shups. Wedu.
Thar go Christopher. Huf. Huf.
Wid gold he own t’ segund urth.
Wid gold he buy our souls inter heaben.

Unpublished endorsement :  Delivered by a voice at once tough and vital, shaped by a sensibility which is sharply aware of tragedy yet open to opportunity, these dry, exemplary poems are quite undeceived by this world – yet touching loyal to it.

John Redmond

Review quote:  [Glancy’s] poetry incorporates a lot of different formal strategies, including compound words, and a strategic use of spacing, italics, and captials…. Reaching back into the community and staying connected with one’s family seems central to [her] writing – acts that are fueled by the power of memory.

Jennifer Andrews
The American Indian Quarterly

Unpublished endorsement :  Diane Glancy’s Rooms is a masterpiece of poetic clarity and “abstraction”: the clarity of belonging, of totemic relationship with land, animals, environment, and the spirituality of her people, but also the abstractions of Western thought that’s brought its aesthetic removals from what is. Glancy is a highly sophisticated poet of “both” worlds, of different heritages, but her Cherokee nation and responsibility call through all else — heritage becomes more than a storehouse of language and stories, it becomes the essence of language and belonging. This is a revolutionary work.

John Kinsella

Unpublished endorsement :  To praise a poet’s eye has, on occasion, been deemed disingenuous praise, privileging, as it does, the poet’s precise but secretarial transcription of the visible. In Glancy’s case, the keen (and keening?) vision avails far more than is immediately apparent — correspondences both semantic and mythic, affinities both historic and current — bringing into view for the rest of us an exhilarating vista, a genuinely visionary scene in which we find, quite surprisingly, ourselves, seeing more clearly.

Scott Cairns

Unpublished endorsement :  Diane Glancy creates memorable poetry in every phrase, gesture, metaphor, and tease of ordinary time and place. Rooms: New and Selected Poems is an occasion of delights and medicine.

Gerald Vizenor