Poems for the Pardoned

By Cathryn Hankla

In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla addresses with humor and wonder the many tensions we must battle in forging both relationships and the self amidst the weight of our collective history. She discovers likeness in seemingly disparate subjects - animal and human, seen and unseen, speech and silence, the pardoned and the condemned - applying the reason of the heart and spirit in a reconciliation of the many dissonances life presents. Always nimble, intelligent, and truthful, these poems speak to what is most elusive and yet most valuable in being human. Shade trees throw odd symmetries of shadow to damp ground, where she lays down her head, crown through the spine's knots, to the trap of incarnation. Teenaged boys mimic a crippled woman's stumbling gait, but at least they are laughing, I think, and we are safe, one woman asleep, one sentinel awake. I see her shift, my sleeping, younger self. Tangled in a cave of sleep, she lays her body on the body of the map, sinks stolid roots to Roman toads. Plowing straight and deep, she covers places where we failed each other, by cinder and maul, cannon, treaty, and marriage, covering towns whose names still wound the tongue,

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807128120
• ISBN13: 9780807128121
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Length: 56 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.8" x 9.3"