Crazy Quilt

by Vivian Shipley

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887012192
• ISBN13: 9781887012195
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Hanover Press
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Nothing Worth Knowing Slips from a Straight Trunk

Crazy quilts are so called because they are created from all types and shapes of fabric held together by all types and shapes of stitches. The fabrics are taken from family dresses, shirts and suits worn to life's events: weddings, funerals, baptisms, dances. As the quilt passes generation to generation, these pieces of the past go with it, keeping memories alive. Their only theme is randomness. In this her fifth collection, Shipley has snipped pieces from her life, from her family's lives and from the lives of others, famous, infamous, unknown, and stitched them together into a poetic crazy quilt. Like a quilt, its pieces are randomly assorted, like the random growth of cancer cells, the randomness of memory resulting from dementia, the randomness of thought a poet uses to connect the dots of life and make an ordered structure out of them.And there is a structure here. In the same way that the stitching on a quilt draws its disparate parts into a whole, so Shipley's grief over the illness and aging of her parents draws apparently unconnected poems into a complex, dense-packed meditation upon death. The language is plain, although by no means spare, the mood sorrowful. Thoughts, like turkey vultures, circle above life, swooping down to snatch at death of every type, from catastrophic to `a death so quiet, a death so small' as a duck taken by a turtle.Each section takes the title of a quilting stitch. Section I, `Feathered Chain,' opens with `No Thanks Christo, No Gold Lame For Me,' in which Shipley reveals her process of creating poetry. She speaks of boxes `waxed, unwaxed, corrugated cardboard, shippers, / wired wooden sides, those with pressboard ends, / paper-covered slats . . . Inactive boxes cornered / in the shed let me finger rough surfaces of my past.' Like babushka boxes stacked one inside the other, each thought, unpacked, reveals another. Although Shipley is too subtle to refer to it, Pandora's box inevitably comes to mind. Open it and out tumble the nightmares of an ordinary life: the teenager paralyzed in a motor accident, the onset of arthritic knees, of age spots on the hands, `the woman / I am, pulling hair back to tighten skin around my eyes,' the inevitable loss of parents.Section II, `Herringbone,' reaches out beyond the personal to find experiences in common with the famous. The onset of old age she finds in Shakespeare who complains `I need much sleep now, / past my best time,' followed by T. S. Eliot warning an insane Ezra Pound of `the rhythm like Joe Louis punching / a bag, steady, hard like the years mounting you will be.' Shipley recommends workshopping the senses until the `Water is so clear, every rock in the riverbed can be seen' and in the final stanzas of `No Time To Wallow In The Mire,' she does see clearly. After a detailed description of a climbing trip into the Andes, she declares: `I vow / to see my life as a whole, not measure it out in days, years / broken into entrance, end. I may snail forward or spiral, /