Ash. - Review - book review

Black Issues Book Review, July, 2001 by Hoke S. III Glover

Ash by Sharan Strange Beacon Press, April 2001, $14.00, ISBN 0-807-06863-2

A member of the Boston-based Dark Room Collective and current resident of Washington, D.C., Strange chooses a place south of these two cities to take her poetic journey. In a rural atmosphere, she paints a world where the names, the images and pictures of the people converge into a distinct feeling that borders on oddity. The portrayal of this oddity is the collection's greatest achievement.

The reader is drawn to the particulars of the action, moment and specific aspects of the people portrayed here and in these portraits, we recognize something familiar. So many of us with roots in the south are familiar with the dynamics of the small town that unfold poem by poem. In Jimmy's First Cigarette one feels the uncertainty and chance of the crossroads of adolescence. In Outhouses the poet reveals the symbolism and power underlying the once everyday object.

This is a book for those who love language. Strange is masterful in her ability to capture and juxtapose the audible qualities of language alongside the literary tools of assonance and alliteration. On a purely aural level, I was amazed by the music contained in so many of the lines in this book. Yet, it is not just the notes of the music (words) that astounds, but the context: the framework of the story, the energy and motion, the rhythm and tempo and the poet's careful attention to resolution that give the poems their sense of wholeness.

One of my favorite poems from Ash is The Stranger, the story of a grandmother who is half relative, half mystery--an incomplete image handed down in story. She is the woman who'd "come and go as the spirit moved her." She is the relative whose memory is full of questions which the poet answers with her own art-like magic:"

I come back to her/often, gazing in the mirror at a face with its own wild luminance, its own secrets." In this mirror we find the power of Ash, where language and music combine to form a picture in which the reflections of our own lives, our own stories are revealed in poetry.

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a graduate of the University of Maryland M.F.A. program and published poet.