CoPo

Serpas, Martha.

The Dirty Side of the Storm.

Norton. 2006..c..96p.

ISBN 0-393-06266-X

$23.95,poetry.

“The Salvage”

Martha Serpas’ second work, The Dirty Side of the Storm, takes careful pleasure in the teasing out of mysteries and binaries; good and evil, life and death, destruction and construction, give way to the swirling, deeply gray, humane truth. Serpas, a devout Catholic, does not preach, but questions, finding these divisions to be imperceptible, incomprehensible, and untrue to suffering humanity. Her poetics achieve this original and honest grappling in the face of the clear legacies and boxed-up poetic movements to which her poetry may be superficially ascribed. Martha Serpas may be decried as a mystical poet, a nature poet, a Southern poet, a female poet, a religious poet, and (by default) a current events poet. Yet, none of these distinctions take into account the mastery of Serpas’ own desire to reach toward the incomprehensible, the shadowy in-betweens with which she is most intimate. The deeper she reaches into herself, and the topography of her life and location, the more we see into the muddied waters of our own life. What sustains us is also deadly, and the Divine is not a winged rescuer, but a figure as complex and paradoxical as His creation.

As a poet, Serpas stands powerfully upon her own gift of sound-work, pulsing and cyclical use of forms, and the originality and intimacy of her metaphoric landscape. Her base of a Catholic God and the Louisiana Bayou are not limitations on the scope of her work; rather, like any good poet, she uses what is at hand as a concrete base for transcendence. Her poetic landscape is focused by a steady hand, and self-consciously participates in traditional metaphors (chiefly, that of water), and formal traditions: couplets, tercets, quatrains, as well as episodic free-verse. Tracing the arch of the book as a whole, it is clear that the individual lyrics contain piece-meal narrative structure. But they are not so bound and ordered as to be a sequence. Rather, they constitute a shapely volume; many of the poems were published in literary journals individually.
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Original post by Whitney