Blood by Alana Sherrill

Alana Sherrill’s Blood weeps with a sadness solid as a slave-song coming from a thicket,nthe message strong for what humanity never loses.  I mean the flame — it is here — precise, eloquent, powerfully rich in loving rages.

–Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

The poems in Alana Sherrill’s Blood are by and large poems of loss, but it would not be right to call them elegiac, or grieving. Poem after poem explores and enlarges upon Wallace Stevens’ famous line in “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty . . ..” In the first poem “Cadaver,” there is no miraculous sign of passage from the material to the spiritual, only the steady, true resuscitation of memory. These are poems of cycles and seasons, generations, commemorations, tributes. Sherrill’s language, as in “He Might As Well Have Been David,” is a beautiful mongrel, now technical and specialized, now loose and familiar and slangy, now artful and aesthetic, again, much like Stevens. From the gorgeous pantheistic lyricism of “Here After” to the intentionally quotidian prose of “Now,” painfully aware of the imminent apocalyptic irruptions that lurk around every corner to “lacerate lives,” Sherrill’s grounded, steely-eyed faith that “we will stitch patch the place back together, but it won’t be the same” endures.

–Jim Clark

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]