Motherhouse: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an "old beige comb from home," the boundlessness of a "three-axled God"), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a cloth woven from disparate voices and structures, expressing both the deep divisions of the self and the longing for a whole that may be ultimately shaped.The convent, then prairie: stretchesitself across the Great Plains,grabs the bank of the Red River of the Northin one handand the Rockies in the otherand pulls: you can seeuntil your sight failsnothing elseis in the waywhere something other should bethere is only your darkeningsightresistancelike bone, filleted clean in the windwhich comesfrom everywhereFrom Motherhouse by Kathleen Jesme. Copyright 2004 by Kathleen Jesme. All rights reserved.