Stone Bow Prayer

By Amy Uyematsu and Cleo Qian

Book Overview

Uyematsu's poems articulate a distinct perspective--a life defined by poetry, mathematics and Asian identity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556592213
• ISBN13: 9781556592218
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A Nest of Wonder

Let's begin by saying that I do not like to write reviews. I resist the impulse. To my thinking, a great many reviewers use the podium to pronounce themselves superior to the art they review. I'll not have it. Such said, I want to make a rare personal exception to recommend to you Amy Uyematsu's beautiful and searing Stone Bow Prayer. This is a really amazing book. Reviewers love extended metaphors. Here's mine. Amy Uyematsu's book is rather like a bird's nest. Composed of whatever is best available, it is all woven together with no architectural pomposity, but rather instinctive grace. The pieces work because the whole is a kind of necessity, a genetic imperative. Blending rage, love, tenderness, autobiography, curiosity, cultural yearning and history, among other strands and straws, Ms. Uyematsu creates a rare and strange miracle here, as if any miracle were not strange or rare. Of course, the individual poems themselves are really wonderful. Her voice is always clear and crisp, a mockingbird call in the morning, when most of us are just beginning to arise for the long hours and the dull routines. Do you know the sound? The mockingbird remembers everything, all of life's echoes, but transforms it in her own right, striving to find solace through song in a lonely place, our place. Here is a brief excerpt from her poem "Heat." Note the casual elegance that can only arise from truth accurately observed, understood through experience, and honestly rendered: "Has it already been one year/since you said you were leaving me?/You wonder out loud whether the bird/flew north or south for the winter./It's just our luck/that blind, stubborn instinct leads/this noisy bird to our backyard,/to nest in its one lonely tree." I guess that's it. Purity, gentleness, intelligence, vision, righteousness, soul...the writing of Amy Uyematsu is here as it has been for some time now, the call to which you awaken, startled at first, then yearning for the voice, wishing that it never passes from your own memory-which it will not, because it will become embedded in your own code for life. Amy Uyematu's voice, in this extremely handsome volume, thanks to Copper Canyon Press, will echo as long as there are ears to hear and hearts to feel and minds to revel in the song that awakens, the wings that soar, the nest that bears.