Review published in Gently Read Literature, 2009

Pamela Uschuk is the author of four volumes of poetry as well as numerous chapbooks, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.  She has been featured at international conferences, has spent years traveling, and has taught creative writing to Native American students on reservations in the west. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado

Her poems in this 84-page collection (published by Wings Press) are dense and richly textured.  The work has an improvisational quality. She may leap from a single image to contemplations far removed, winding through a trajectory of vivid memories, and reflections. Everything is grist for the mill-material that other writers might put into diaries, memoirs, or novels may be compressed into a few lines or a poem.

Nature in its many forms permeates her consciousness, from a single flower, a tomato plant, a trapped bird, to mountains, sky, ocean. This love of nature mingles with love of husband, family, and friends.

In "Saving the Cormorant on Albermarle Sound." She writes:

            Numb and saturated by spray, it is now

            I love you most, love your thick purple wrist

            Straining to hold the bird above hungry waves,

            Love the deft gentleness of your swollen hand

            That cuts brutal knots without wounding the bird

            Who stares at you resolute as its barbed restraint

            When finally, through the last styrene twist,

            You fling the huge bird free...

            We are stunned....as we paddle back to shore

            Above the condemned rows of sea bass and all

            Those snared in darkness we'll never see.

Social and political concerns run throughout her work, as in "Sunday News on the Navajo Rez."

            Stopped at a gas station outside Gallup...

            and a white pickup pulls up.

            The woman my age, wrapped in a red Pendleton coat...

            Oh you hear something about what happened up in Colorado

            We trade what we know about the monster avalanche

            That closed Highway 40...

            We don't have much time for news here

            What with the baby goats and lambs...

            her fingers

             tapped out the names of  her daughters,  especially the last

            ready to head with her company

            to a desert, far across the unknown globe, where villagers

            also raise goats and avalanches take the form

            of a roadside waiting to explode.

"Flying Through Thunder" presents the overwhelming awareness of nature as at once a reality larger, more durable than human emotions, and at the same time tender, ephemeral as a flower.  It progresses through images that stir thoughts and memories, shifting back and forth from the storm through which her plane is actually flying

            From expectant sunflowers, mountain bluebirds, western meadowlarks....

             the small turbo prop pitches toward glacial peaks...

             I remember the way my stomach dropped as a child pumping my swing higher...

             my brother dared me to jump

            Bombs away. We're hit. Jump. Jump....

            How could I....foresee

             that in a few years my brother would be

            drafted to paratrooper school

            to ruin his young knees

             when he landed just off the training mark

            preparing for Vietnam?

            When the army found out he attended rallies, preached peace. He

            was shipped to Da Nang, to dousings

            with Agent Orange

             to the burning of village peoples, to daily mortar attacks

            and sniper fire he still fights...

            Now as the plane lunges, engines

            steady above the Continental Divide.

            I regard razor backed ridges

            older than memory

            vaster than scars. They comfort me

            in their lack of pity...

She is able to condense entire life stories into a few lines, as in "Bell Note" written in memory of her father.

            Sometimes, Dad, there is no loneliness like an ad for the superbowl

            all those coaches blunders you'd cuss out

             or the lies of politicians on TV

             smiling as they staggered like possums

             on the sides of reasons highway...

            [...]

             Remember driving cross-country year

            after year from Michigan to Colorado....

            What did you say to Mom, who sat

            knitting or reading in the back seat, when

            she'd startle like a rock dove, head

            jerking up at us with her shriek

             "We're going the wrong way!

             That field's on fire. It's heading

             right for us!" Maybe her delusions knew that

            the fire was always heading for us, her heart,

            that you'd always keep her from the flames.

With their multiple images and swift traversals of thought,  her poems provide ample substance for reflection. They are best savored when read slowly, preferably several times, in order to absorb their full impact.