Do not Peel the Birches

In her second collection of poems, Fleda Brown Jackson holdswith a meditative rapture to the place she call home – home as family,the source of trouble and joy; home as the embellished stories of family; andhome as a place called Central Lake. And when the poems move outward –to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, Kitty-Hawk, Roanoke, St. Pete Beach, and theMississippi River – the past keeps resonating. At last, the voice thatremembers becomes nothing but a riding, a hunger. If Iwere a swan, she imagines, "The world would move / under me / andI would always be exactly / where I am." There is an end to history, Jacksonsays, when at last real life and art are able to merge: a mythic Elvis stepsout of her ancestral outhouse, and his singing sounds very much like her ownvoice. "It's not as if one vent stands / beside another, separated by adelicate / membrane," she writes in another poem. It's "all done throughimages, the blood of fear, / of rage, soaking through the towel."