A Bare Unpainted Table

By Gladys Cardiff

Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and a member of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her small book, To Frighten a Storm, from Copper Canyon Press, won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. These are poems from a mature and wise consciousness that understands loss, grief, and the value of the unassailable "solaces we yearn for." One emerges from Cardiff's intense, complex meditations with a renewed sense of both the durability of the human spirit and its potential.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932826679
• ISBN13: 9780932826671
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Length: 61 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Lyrical and moving poetry

Gladys Cardiff's poetry balances between the breathtaking and the acutely painful -- she opens doors with her images that lead the reader forward into new spaces, new emotional states. I recommend her work highly -- personal, moving, yet completely accessible and relevant. Gorgeous important work.

Rich and Complex

This is an amazing book, sophisticated and musical. Whether Cardiff is telling us about Giacometti, turtles, erotic photographs, or her joyful return to the Qualla Boundary, these poems are engrossing. I've reread the book several times since I bought it; its richness seems infinite.

Cardiff writes intelligently about art, grief and loss.

Cardiff's poetry is intelligent, humane and passionate. Hers is a poetry of conciliation. She is not preaching to the converted. Her Native American heritage doesn't "limit" her poetry, it illuminates it. "Repatriation" presents one of the most complex of cultural subjects in such a way as to foster an understanding which reading any number of articles could not equal. Art, loss, grief, the natural world--these are Cardiff's subjects. While her poems are sometimes difficult and challenging, the rewards they offer are well worth the effort. The poem "It has something to do with final words," about an air disaster, and about the power of poetry and words themselves, is one I return to again and again.