The Memory of Gills

By Catherine Carter

Book Overview

"Carter's poems are utterly unique-wry and quiet and carrying a velvet sledgehammer. Her pitch, her tone, her sly humor is perfectly tuned. This is not just a brilliant first book, it is a brilliant book, period."-Thomas Lux Catherine Carter's first volume of poetry exudes a genuinely classical quality-cool-eyed and clear-eyed, intelligent, unsentimental, self-aware, and witty in the fullest and best sense. Carter takes our evolutionary development in the womb as a departure point for remembering or imagining our links with nonhuman animals, which make us feel both alien and alive. She writes of being "raised by wolves," that "everyone marries into another species," and of "hearing things" in the voices of the rattlesnake plantain or the apple core. With an offbeat, sometimes-gallows humor-the poems' subjects range from roadkill to stingray-human sex to a traffic ticket for avoiding toads on the road-that looks at our connections of blood, home, and exile, The Memory of Gills nonetheless speaks of hope that we belong where we are. "The Memory of Gills is altogether an astonishing, seductive, and finally irresistible book of poems. Carter is a skillful, imaginative, and witty visionary. Here is a poet who hears the voices of the sensate world calling, pleading, cajoling, and although she says, in 'Hearing Things, ' 'I don't / know how to answer, what / to say, ' don't believe her. She does know. And her poems say what she knows with a zest and inventiveness that no reader will soon forget."-Kathryn Stripling Byer

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807131768
• ISBN13: 9780807131763
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

THE POETRY OF PERSISTENCE

THE MEMORY OF GILLS has been a long time coming. Not as long of course as the eons it's been since we had gills. Lucky for us it is finally here, because it is a gem among all the others beckoning from the shelves for our attention. So here's my suggestion, snap it up, run home and dive in. Read it in the attic in the old rocker, out on the porch on the swing or by the sea with the waves nipping at your toes. With the zest of one who's moved around a bit we get views from the depths of love, eye to eye with clover, peaking from under the covers, and from places that only exist in the magic of poetry. You'll have to force yourself to put this book down, to savor it in smaller bits, rather then swallowing it whole and still feeling hungry. With sights and smells, sounds and sympathies you'll march along from poem to poem completely oblivious to the rest of the world. THE MEMORY OF GILLS is an excellent example of the poetry of persistence. With this book in hand we are brought to a place where we can benefit from the years of work, the diligent reworking, and the brushing away of rejection notices to find a home with a publisher that decided Catherine Carter's poems had evolved to the point that they could breathe on their own.