Little River, her first book to be published outside the U.S., expands on Linda McCarriston's previous lyrical and personal narrative work, dealing with issues which have engaged her for many years. She speaks with sure conviction and with empathy on the difficult issues of family life and gender power structures. Her fine and loving portrayals of animals, children, friendships and landscapes, make this a rare synthesis of a poet's vision; an acute awareness of the anguish caused by the misuse of power, infused with deep love and tenderness. 
 
 

About the Author

A native of Lynn, Massachusetts, Linda McCarriston holds dual Irish/U.S.A. citizenship. When she resumed writing poems in her mid thirties, her work began to be published widely. Talking Soft Dutch (Texas Tech Press, 1984)and Eva-Mary (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 1991) her first two books, were both award-winners, the second a finalist for America's prestigious National Book Award. She has been teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage since 1994. 

Poems from Little River

With the Horse in the Winter Pasture

Zero degrees, no wind, and barely
the January sun has begun to ripen.
You, who all day yesterday
brooked with your body
a brutal storm from the north,
now graze as amiably over the snow
and hay as if it were August.
Or more so: free of the flies, free
of the rider -- bit, crop, and fetter.
What we endure need not turn us to stone,
insists the gray bird in the birch-on-blue,
who survives in her three least notes.
And so, today, I am victim
of nothing, nor am I mistress, just
hanging around the sun-catching corner
as if it were after school, a fool,
a woman carrying on like a girl.
I throw my arm over your withers
and bury my face in your neck:
white plush, pulse, smell
of woodsmoke. The child is alive
who prayed by her bed to die.
 
 
 

In Off the Cliffs of Moher

This is the wind they say makes people
mad here. Bare-legged after her bath
she is lying on the sofa by the window

as if watching a flock of birds at a feeder --
color, ardor, flight. I have not been here
long enough to guess what such a wind

might do, season after season, to a woman,
to a man. But the sheep, I can see, all day
mill up and back among the tatters of the

stone pasture fences: restlessness, neglect
in the dooryards of before, and the grazing 
ghosts the wind won't let leave home.
 
 
 

Local

In an Irish pub, vatican
of stout and fags, I travel back
a family generation, to the land
of an honest man's failing. With such

no other island is so richly
endowed. I myself was many years
inclined to honesty but now deceive
myself perhaps and others, having come

a decade -- more -- ago to the crossroad
where the pure refusal of a drunk's
grave meets the compromise of walking
the crooked lane conscious.

I cannot bear to watch the man
who so delights them in a parody
of dance but watch them watch him
with smiles that shine communal and

benign, whose brother, just months past,
himself was swept -- like an ill-advised 
explorer in the ocean-caves below 
this Fisher Street bar -- away

in the gay and honest waves of drink
turned savage in the innerworld, turned
toothed and clawed in the changeless
village tide that always turns.
 
 
 

Little River
 for E.S.

Dear friend, I miss you.
Though you were a flame
in your red jacket, your hair
red-black, it is in green
that I see you ? green stones,
barely greater than pebbles, cobbling
the broad river bottom; green water,
shallow, with its cast of brown.
How plumb those fishing days were,
our lines from the two sides of the oxbow
pulled taut to the same angle
in the passing flow. Sitting
back to back like that, I could not
see your eyes. But in the memory
I see them. Of everything, best
I remember them. Brown eyes.
Lights of green.
 

(Copyright Linda McCarriston 2000. All Rights Reserved.)
 
 

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