Terry Ann Thaxton

Biographical note:  Terry Ann Thaxton has published poetry in Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry, West Branch, Hawai’i Review, Connecticut Review, and other journals. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she teaches creative writing and directs The Literary Arts Partnership at UCF.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715114
ISBN:  9781844715114
Author:  Terry Ann Thaxton
Title:  Getaway Girl
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-11
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In the search to clarify the past–and thus transform the present, these poems turn over the shards of memory like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope, looking for an angle that will light up the great mystery of how we become and continue becoming who we are.

Main description:  Terry Ann Thaxton sifts through the images of a childhood half-buried among the pines and saw palmetto of her native Florida and unearths a child orphaned by abuse. In a home where “Southern Baptists exchange judgments,” she hides among a tribe of siblings, roaming the woods and playing games that hold equal degrees of cruelty and love. At the first opportunity she flees – into the arms of more abuse, then, wildly, into years where “suitcases fell from the closet” and “she thinks of marching toward [the pond], / perhaps reaching a gray cloud, pulling the switch.” And yet, somehow, “the sky offers its philanthropy all day.” The genealogy of despair is also the genealogy of hope. In the search to clarify the past–and thus transform the present – these poems turn over the shards of memory like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope, looking for an angle that will light up the great mystery of how we become and continue becoming who we are.

Table of contents:
Contents
I
Getaway Girl
Getaway Girl
The Yearning City
Suicide Boys
The Garden
Mad Insects
A Different Life
Boy in Distant Oak
Night Ironing
II
The God of the Dead
Good News
Where Hell Is
Family Room
My Red Dress
Wallpaper
Map of Charleston, West Virginia
An Ordinary Door
Holiday Gifts
Proof
Tent of Freaks
My Mother, the Missionary
Fourth of July
III
Small Bending Hope
Dream Ride
Scrub Jay’s Voice
Tidal Wave
Mother’s Necklace
Girls at Slumber Party
How I Learned Romance
Cow Skulls
Furious Arrow
Forgotten Morning
Small Bending Hope
IV
Water Letting Go of Sunlight
Absence of Water
The Fairy Tale
Find the River
The Bag Lady
Another Night in Jealous, U.S.A.
The Comfort of Your Hands After Rain
Woman Reading at River
Ovarian Cyst
Everglades
Wind Through Blackbird Wings
Invisible Birds
Water Letting Go of Sunlight

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Excerpt from book:  

Woman Reading at River

Late morning. A pair of red-shouldered hawks
abandon the tall branches of long pines, and I look up

from the pages I have come to wade through
in peace. Wind on water becomes words

bobbing across a page. Quiet. Dragonfly. Sleep.
A yellowlegs hammers out words

in water as if it is a sheet of paper where I have written
all my love songs.

Mosquitoes scribble on my arm.
From the waterlilies, a duck neglects the silence of herons

who seem embarrassed and lift themselves
from sound. Across the river a house wades through

woods, barely visible, then departs. A red-wing blackbird
calls his mate, home love-ly? and reminds me

that I want to live here, on this water, with him,
where everything is silent except when needing

territory or food. But beyond the hammocks
of oak and palm, a child waits for me. A city

hides this silence.
And a man lives in my hands.

Unpublished endorsement:  In this collection, Terry Ann Thaxton holds the reader hostage, and sets her free at the same time, in poems that walk the line between pure tension and pure festival, terror and recreation, anxiety and beauty, and always with sure steps, perfect timing, uncanny musical intuition. In Getaway Girl we are introduced to a poet who brings the world to us in eerie clarity, giving mystery and the spirit their full due while staying firmly grounded in the gritty details of a life. "Let me demand//a vase as a sequel to myself." Terry Ann Thaxton has given us the vase, and the self, and a whole new way of looking at this world in her remarkable, unforgettable, poetry collection.

Laura Kasischke

Unpublished endorsement:  In Getaway Girl Terry Ann Thaxton enters the haunted threshold territory between past and present. In these lyric narratives she explores how and why we stray so irresistibly to that place. Despite the harrowing circumstances of the poet's childhood and early adulthood, despite the absolute necessity for escape, there's a paradoxical longing to be found, to recover "the lost openings of my life," echoed beautifully in the empty carapace of a box turtle, fishcrows crying for shore, the unsent letter of a remembered voice … . Thaxton is a poet of nature, but first and foremost she is a poet of remarkable imagination. This is an authentic, marvelous first collection.

Nancy Eimers