“Open
Donna Isaac‘s Persistence of Vision
and be immediately caught up in a luscious poem moving across
the page à la the first moving pictures. Thereafter , ‘reveries
in misty blue,’ the old flicks you watched while ‘chomping’ down
goodies, bring back Fred Astaire, Kate Hepburn, Hattie McDaniel,
the Beatles, Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers and Busby Berkeley.
And more! Isaac’s are lip-smacking poems of sadness and
goodness. With her rambunctious pleasure in words and obvious
love for her subjects, Persistence becomes a silver
screen temple in itself. Rating? ****” In Persistence
of Vision, Donna Isaac celebrates the
role of movies in her life with an exuberant facility of
diction, image, and sound. An homage to Charlie Chaplin, tells
us, “We like prat-falling in the rain/dangling from industrial
cogs, and toddling off into the sunset…” I also enjoy the
way Isaac weaves the details of everyday life into her poems. In
“Kiddie Matinees, her mother, ignorant of the “mayhem showing at
the Saturday matinee”… “wanted us out of the house / so she
could pine-sol the tile.” “Seeking” ends with Dorothy Gale back
home with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, “de-tasseling corn, canning
tomatoes, helping Zeke slop the hogs.” My favorite poem in this
joyful, poignant, and witty collection is “Songcatcher”: I’d like to
roam the mountains of North Carolina wading in cold streams,
warblers, veeries, and siskins on the wing, fog awash on peaks,
the drama of Tanawha, sedges and spruce, and collect tunes from
folks who know “Mary of the Wild Moor,” “Moonshiner,” and “Fair
and Tender Ladies,” crooned and warbled on front porch chairs,
salamanders askitter in the goldenrod, silverlings dancing in
the moonlight, and all the cliff edges alive with avens. My
backpack filled with poetry, I’d hike back down, push play, bake
cornbread, cook butter beans, sit a spell and rock back and
forth, back and forth, humming, eyes closed, floating on
reveries of misty blue.
"These
poems
dazzle and delight...full of home, hurt, healing. Reading them
will settle and unsettle you, give you cause to laugh and
lament, and realize that Donna Isaac is a clear-eyed, talented
poet who invites you to look again at what might seem familiar,
shivering in recognition at what you missed the first time. We
are lucky to have her poems in the world. I am already looking
forward to seeing what comes next." Sandra Ballard, Editor of
Appalachian Journal; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia,
Appalachian State University Footfalls is available for purchase through Pocahontas Press or through Donna Isaac for $20.00.
Tommy, an elegiac
chapbook, celebrates and mourns a younger brother who died
young. Using varied poetic forms, landscape, and memory, poet
Donna Isaac takes the readers through a personal and yet
universal journey of grief and acceptance. Each poem represents
a step that a sister must take to understand that both suffering
and joy are necessary for an authentic life. Using imagery of
the natural world as touchstones in many of the poems, Isaac
connects the beauty of beach, mountain, and flower with the
beauty that was her brother.
Holy Comforter, a
collection of 31 poems reflects a childhood steeped in memories
of growing up in Southern landscapes, including the attending of
Catholic elementary schools. Lyrically, we hear both the voice
of the child as well as the adult writer. Weaving together small
snapshots of the people and places long gone with new-found
discoveries of spirituality, Holy Comforter resonates
with vivid and sometimes startling imagery; varying forms; and a
mixture of the comic and the tragic. To
purchase Holy Comforter
or Tommy,
download this order
form. |