Sometime in the winter of 2005 Joanne told me that she & Donald were planning a trip to Veracruz. They'd made several trips to Mexico over the years, always during the winter months when it can be pretty dismal, cold & wet, in their hometown Bolinas. Joanne often returned from these trips with a bunch of new poems, great suites of poems notably published in little bokes like Patzcuaro (Blue Millennium, 1999) & God Never Dies: Poems from Oaxaca (from our own Blue Press, 2004 - we still have a few copies in stock http://bluepressbooks.com/).
I guess it was in December when I heard that the Veracruz trip was canceled & that she & Donald would be holing up in Bolinas that winter. Joanne didn't let that stop her as evidenced in this new boke Not Veracruz published by Libellum in 2007.
The poems in Not Veracruz continue the attention to the delicate conversation between space and mind, or location and thought, that powers Kyger’s verse. Of Not Veracruz Kyger has said it’s “a Day Book for lack of a better way to address what I think of as a daily practice of brush stroke immediacy.” Written during the first 3 months of 2006, these lyrics are solidly grounded in her home of Bolinas & touch upon such topics as the weather, friends & passing political news reports that seem to be constantly playing on a radio or television somewhere in the background. A nervous, sometimes irritating source of inspiration for this poet
I need friends from outer space
to save me from knee jerk belligerence
and total lack of coherent thought
(from “The Studio”)
I’m still getting my energy from Not Veracruz. These are poems that pick me up and set me down, scattering me across a familiar landscape, one that I know by heart although Kyger always makes it seem like a place that I’ve never been before.
