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Cheryl Savageau Mother/Land |
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Biographical
note: Cheryl Savageau, Abenaki, a poet and fiction writer, was born in central Massachusetts, the oldest of six children, and grew up in an island neighborhood on Lake Quinsigamond. She is of mixed French Canadian and Abenaki heritage. She graduated from Clark University in 1978, where she began writing "by accident" when she signed up for a poetry class through Continuing Education to finish her degree, and it turned out to be a writing class. Her apprenticeship as a writer was through the People's Poets and Artists Workshop in Worcester, MA, started by the poet Etheridge Knight in 1977. Cheryl worked for several years as a poet and storyteller in the schools through the Massachusetts Artist in Residence program. Since 1993, she has been a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, working as a mentor to apprentice Native writers. Cheryl has taught at Clark University, Holy Cross College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is now teaching in the Native American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Her current writing projects include a third volume of poetry and a novel about chronic illness.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844712694
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Excerpt from book: Underage
Unpublished endorsement : Mother/Land is restoring the world through the retelling of patterns passed woman to woman like songs to lips. In this familial place, where one haggles over Memere’s house dress, combs her Mama’s hair as if brushing a bird’s wing, employs mother-of-pearl to fill the black hole of her absence leaving buxom hills bare of trees. From this childhood where one might wear a dress of fall grass, cut ankles on witchgrass, and peer into a refrigerator to delineate a hummingbird from a moth; in the land of mothers, grandmothers, and their later lineal offspring, we come to terms with crossroads and swallows, rivers and oceans, and they lead us back home from which we began—the Motherland. Allison Hedge Coke
Unpublished endorsement : Cheryl Savageau stares into stones of amber, opal, emerald, garnet, sapphire, amethyst, pearl, quartz, peridot, and onyx,recording every change of light and color they throw on old and new loves. She examines recurring characters and places from as many angled refractions as possible until one of the richest, fullest New England spiritual topographies ever written emerges. Readers who know Savageau’s earlier chronicling of those who sacralize and profane her homescape will be astonished at this poetic culmination of fully-drawn portraits. I fell, hard, for the boy under the drain pipe, the whale’s word for world, the slapping tails of children, the hummingbird in the refrigerator, the cathechist with knife in her teeth, the wife spraying breast milk at the breakfast table, the woodchuck too busy for crucifixions, the piano baptized in molasses, the parakeet’s family jewels, the leathered and lathered Doc Martened butch leading her woman around the dance floor, the lightning that converses with fireflies, and everyone, everything that busts out of the gamebag and into Cheryl Savageau’s poetry. This may be one of the best literary depictions of New England to date, certainly the finest one to challenge whatever is new and English about the place. Craig S. Womack |
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