Review of the Chapbook
Here's the review. I like it -- its short and sweet.
BOOK REVIEW
By M. D. Friedman
Creation Stories
Amy Wray Irish
Green Fuse Community Press, 2008
In Creation Stories, a collection of original art and poetry, Amy Wray Irish creates a song of magic for the modern world. Her work acts as a “womb of skin” for the recurring themes of creation and birth, which transports us as readers to a place of primal connection where we see “nothing but beauty.” In this volume, Amy becomes a priestess of word and image whose incantations launch us toward the journey into ourselves that we each must take.
Creation Stories opens with “Shed,” a piece in which the inner poet and artist, is “itching to get out,/Ripping and twitching/to get out.” In “Lady of the Moths,” this inner poet reveals that she is ready to leave behind anyone or anything that would “blacken her window” or prevent her from creating the new world of light she needs. Like many creation stories, she starts in darkness:
Mother, tell me this is not my voice,
This air raid siren
Bringing him to his knees;
Not my anger
As she examines the corporal for answers, she simply finds more questions:
So determined are our empty
Shells. So how do we know when we
Are simply hunger in the belly--how do we know
When we are something more?
Then, in the “Birth of Venus,” she answers her own question and finds the goddess within herself:
In the ebb of your own blood-red sea--
You become more; you are truly
Born. Venus, taste of yourself,
Of your briny ocean
Mother. Aphrodite, become goddess
Of your own love.
In the second section of the collection, the speaker is consumed as she assumes her role as creator/mother/priestess/goddess/poet/artist. “I swallowed this seed, and what I consumed/Consumes me whole, belly and all.” It is a feeling with which poets and artists are all too familiar. It is in this role that she finds her magical powers:
When you feel heat sear from your fingertips,
The power to take hold, to explode--
When you are reborn, purified,
An archangel rising on wings of light--
Only then call me. Call me your mother,
Your lover, your twin. Matching flare
To fire, to flame. We will write
And set the world to blaze.
This call to “set the world to blaze” with poetry is at the heart of all the efforts of the Green Fuse Community. We must thank Amy Irish for this wonderful romp through “visionary states that flower/Beyond imagination.”
M. D. Friedman is a poet, teacher, musician, photographer, digital artist and web master from Lafayette, Colorado. He is the founder of the Internet Poets’ Cooperative website which features over 20 free volumes of e-books from poets around the world and over 500 free audio recordings of dozens of Colorado poets reading their own work as well as video from the Poets’ Co-op TV Show. His fourth book of poetry, Where We Reach (2005) combines his poetry with his original photographs and artwork. His creative ventures can also be accessed at www.mdfriedman.com, and at www.digitaldada.org, where the transformational impact of digital creation on common culture is explored.
The chapbook Creation Stories, by Amy Wray Irish, is available now from Green Fuse Press, located in Loveland, Colorado (please email www.greenfusepress@yahoo.com). For more information about Ms. Irish go to www.myspace.com/amywrayirish.
This came out yesterday, and I finally got my mic and stand from snail mail. I finally got to practice with a mic, yeah! Much different, very helpful. I always need to slow down when I read.
BOOK REVIEW
By M. D. Friedman
Creation Stories
Amy Wray Irish
Green Fuse Community Press, 2008
In Creation Stories, a collection of original art and poetry, Amy Wray Irish creates a song of magic for the modern world. Her work acts as a “womb of skin” for the recurring themes of creation and birth, which transports us as readers to a place of primal connection where we see “nothing but beauty.” In this volume, Amy becomes a priestess of word and image whose incantations launch us toward the journey into ourselves that we each must take.
Creation Stories opens with “Shed,” a piece in which the inner poet and artist, is “itching to get out,/Ripping and twitching/to get out.” In “Lady of the Moths,” this inner poet reveals that she is ready to leave behind anyone or anything that would “blacken her window” or prevent her from creating the new world of light she needs. Like many creation stories, she starts in darkness:
Mother, tell me this is not my voice,
This air raid siren
Bringing him to his knees;
Not my anger
As she examines the corporal for answers, she simply finds more questions:
So determined are our empty
Shells. So how do we know when we
Are simply hunger in the belly--how do we know
When we are something more?
Then, in the “Birth of Venus,” she answers her own question and finds the goddess within herself:
In the ebb of your own blood-red sea--
You become more; you are truly
Born. Venus, taste of yourself,
Of your briny ocean
Mother. Aphrodite, become goddess
Of your own love.
In the second section of the collection, the speaker is consumed as she assumes her role as creator/mother/priestess/goddess/poet/artist. “I swallowed this seed, and what I consumed/Consumes me whole, belly and all.” It is a feeling with which poets and artists are all too familiar. It is in this role that she finds her magical powers:
When you feel heat sear from your fingertips,
The power to take hold, to explode--
When you are reborn, purified,
An archangel rising on wings of light--
Only then call me. Call me your mother,
Your lover, your twin. Matching flare
To fire, to flame. We will write
And set the world to blaze.
This call to “set the world to blaze” with poetry is at the heart of all the efforts of the Green Fuse Community. We must thank Amy Irish for this wonderful romp through “visionary states that flower/Beyond imagination.”
M. D. Friedman is a poet, teacher, musician, photographer, digital artist and web master from Lafayette, Colorado. He is the founder of the Internet Poets’ Cooperative website which features over 20 free volumes of e-books from poets around the world and over 500 free audio recordings of dozens of Colorado poets reading their own work as well as video from the Poets’ Co-op TV Show. His fourth book of poetry, Where We Reach (2005) combines his poetry with his original photographs and artwork. His creative ventures can also be accessed at www.mdfriedman.com, and at www.digitaldada.org, where the transformational impact of digital creation on common culture is explored.
The chapbook Creation Stories, by Amy Wray Irish, is available now from Green Fuse Press, located in Loveland, Colorado (please email www.greenfusepress@yahoo.com). For more information about Ms. Irish go to www.myspace.com/amywrayirish.
This came out yesterday, and I finally got my mic and stand from snail mail. I finally got to practice with a mic, yeah! Much different, very helpful. I always need to slow down when I read.