A Scar Upon Our Voice

By Robin Coffee

Book Overview

"You can take from me what you will but you cannot touch the words of my heart," declares author Robin Coffee in the introduction to A Scar Upon Our Voice. In this autobiographical poetry collection, Coffee explores the aftershocks of growing up as an American Indian in a country that has marginalized his cultural identity. Coffee relinquishes his alienation, anger, and his desire to heal wounds inflicted through centuries of betrayal by a self-interested government.

Coffee adeptly speaks to the injustices he has known but is quick to find hope and solace in sharing his work: "A simple gesture born out of kindness can stitch hope into a torn heart and turn a dying spirit into a gift to the world. A simple gesture born out of kindness may be the only coin that the lost and lonely soul has left to give to another in need. A Scar Upon Our Voice is my simple gesture."

Mary Burritt Christiansen's (1923-1998) desire to perpetuate poetry as a literary form inspired her to sponsor a series of poetry books through a generous endowment to UNM Press. A Scar Upon Our Voice is the thirteenth title in the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, for which V. B. Price serves as series editor.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826336299
• ISBN13: 9780826336293
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Coffee's our Okie Neruda

For years now Robin Coffee has hung around the shadowy edges of our eerie little town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capitol of the old Cherokee Nation, now awash in retirees and injun slot machines and dominated by Walmart #10. Coffee lives with his black cat in a lttle 'giraffe' house over east of the old college inahouse hie grandparents built. I visited him recently to shoot some photos. Note the book cover. His house was barely furnished, severai old wood tables were covered, littered with his handwritten and typed MS. For year my friends and I have called on Robin to read his poems at ceremonies and auspicious events that mark local Cherokee life. Once when James Earl Jones came here he selected and read Coffee's poem 'Artists and Musians' Coffee is a powerful and unassuming force of nature and like the great Chilian poet Pablo Neruda, his work displays that attribute clearly. I will make no other comparisons for now, his work stands as written.