With two new books out this year, Miriam Sagan now has 30
books to her credit in a variety of genres—from poetry to novel to memoir. Her
long tenure in the writing world includes founding and heading the creative
writing program at Santa Fe Community College and being a writer in residence
at numerous locations.
The poems in Luminosity evoke a variety of locales,
from Iceland to Wyoming to Oklahoma to Arizona to her home ground of New
Mexico. Miriam’s short, spare lines and direct diction move between the natural
world and the dream world, with images that span both:
you are driving
all night
but have not yet
arrived
in Oklahoma.
In every body of water
anywhere in the world
the moon
reflects back to us
the loneliness
of beauty.
(from “A Funeral in Pawnee”)
The book opens with several poems from her time in Iceland,
where “we stayed up so late talking about the past/it was like an extra dawn
breaking.” She finds connection wherever she goes:
a stone in the desert
marks the presence of god
or where a ladder
teetered
into the night sky
under the sign of Pisces
with angels
going both up and down
like dark carp
in the current
(from “lifting a stone”)
In Bluebeard’s Castle, Miriam intersperses short
prose pieces and poems to tell the story of her relationship with her father,
giving us the man in all his perplexing complexity. A true New Yorker, a
kingpin of the garment industry whose favorite movie was The Godfather,
he retired at age 40 and became a freelance academic. She writes, “When my
father was dying, I made two lists—one of things I liked about him, one of
things I didn’t like. The lists were about the same length…You see my problem.”
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| photo by j perez |
On the one hand, he saved her life once. On the other hand,
he made some aspects of her life a living hell. In the poem “West of the Moon,”
she writes, “I’m waiting/ for my childhood/ to run off/ on its bare/ skinny
legs/ and grass-stained knees.” Aloof and inaccessible, her father spent much
of his time being “incognito,” which she thought was an actual place—“in
Cognito.” It was only after his death that she began to open “the frightening
locked doors of my story.”
That journey takes us up to and through her near-death
experience, and beyond. Forever accused by her father of being a reckless
person (for less than convincing reasons), she takes that bull by the horns in
her poem, “When I Was Young, I Put Myself in Harm’s Way”:
hoping to get hurt
or at least
fall off the back of a motorcycle
and break my heart
how, now past sixty, I’ll still
go out of my way
and travel some cardinal direction or other
saying, I just want to see
(volcano, glacier, Miami Beach)
before it is too late
for me, or it,
and put myself in the way of beauty
and let her have her way with me.
For anyone who appreciates the power of memoir, Bluebeard’s Castle will be a satisfying read—and an apt pairing with the poems of light
and shadow found in Luminosity.
Miriam Sagan is a
prolific author who has won many awards, including the Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for
Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary
Arts, and a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa. Her blog Miriam’s Well has
1,500 daily readers. Her book Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon) won the 2015
Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry.
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