Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted
this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to
the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright
colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the
natural world--birds, lilies, horses--up against that from the world of
humans--oppression, slavery, and violence--ties her work to the earth
even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
In Alexander's world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl
in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood.
When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl's sari, the
material of a woman's life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the
particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly
present--sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open
gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly
Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being
alive.
Aletheia (Girl in River Water) First I saw your face, The your
whole body lying still Hands jutting, eyelids shut Twin nostrils
flare, sheerEfflorescebce when memory cannot speak-a horde of body parts
glistening.
