Twelve years ago, I began writing a blog called A Words Worth and have published at least four posts a month each year since that time. I’ve been faithful to this schedule during that period while living in both Louisiana and Tennessee. This past month I decided to pursue posting only sporadically, probably book reviews and literary events, rather than weekly blog posts written about a variety of subjects. As soon as I made that decision, books by friends and authors, and author events began to show up, and for a while, I may seem to be writing on a schedule, but I’m not. Three books are sitting on my dining room table, and the Pinyon Review that Susan Entsminger published as a salute to my former editor/publisher, Gary Entsminger, is en route, so…
Wednesday night, I attended a Festival of Words event in Grand Coteau, Louisiana that featured Sheryl St. Germain, Louisiana’s Writer of the Year, 2018, who read from two of her books of poetry I purchased that evening. Yesterday morning I opened and read through them in one sitting as St. Germain “spoke to my condition” in her intense, un-self-conscious voice. Of the two volumes I purchased, I chose to write about Let It Be A Dark Roux* because I think it best expresses St. Germain’s lifetime purpose, e.g., in “Flambeau Carriers”:
…I wanted it to be the poet’s job:
to carry the burning night
to hold high our stumbling,
astonished,
street-dancing selves.
Here is the finest poet I’ve read in a long while, one who has a sensuous, heart-exploding voice, who is unafraid to pour out in exquisite and accessible poetry expressions of pain, nostalgia, femaleness, able to incite nostalgia and sadness, sometimes with deft, sharp blows, but always with this amazingly un-self-conscious voice. I might add that she also has an amazingly soft speaking voice, even when she reads her harshest poems and impresses her audience in Grand Coteau with her humility. Usually, I cite other poets who may seem to be predecessors in the same style as the poet I’m reviewing, but this awesome female poet is uniquely outspoken and dissimilar to any I’ve known or read. She touches readers to the bone.
St. Germain’s Cajun origins emerge throughout Let It Be A Dark Roux, and I was drawn to her “Mother’s Red Beans and Rice,” feeling that no one of Cajun origin can flip the page when St. Germain describes the
…ham bone and marrow
to make the gravy thick,
salt pork to make them meaty, smoky
…The beans would cook all day, filling the house
with their creamy onion pork smell, the sauce slowly
thickening, the beans slowly softening
…I eat them like joy.
St. Germain does not gloss over the agonies of addiction and the woundedness of a family afflicted with the diseases of alcohol and hard drugs — father, brother, son, Sheryl herself — but readers will be moved by her candid witness to these agonies and her courage displayed in recovery. Much of the raw story to which she witnesses is told in the second volume I purchased, The Small Door Of Your Death, published in 2018, but I chose to write about the healing memories/experiences of which she wrote that revealed the redeeming aspects of Art.
Again, returning to food — the joy of every true Cajun’s life — when I read “Bread Pudding With Whiskey Sauce,” I was reminded of my paternal grandmother’s kitchen (a Vincent descended from Nova Scotian stock), and, as St. Germain writes:
how sorrow can be transformed
into bread pudding
… dry hard pieces into soft moist bits.
Add raisins and peach halves.
Beat eggs with sugar and cinnamon,
freshly grind allspice and nutmeg.
It will smell like Christmas,
It will smell like your mother’s
happiness. Mix it all together,
bake. The house will fill
with goodness, with the smell
of grace…
I went hunting for Cajun fare after reading that tribute to good food (and found gumbo on a cold day in Acadiana).
Perhaps readers will not be able to breathe easily when Germain writes of the heavy breath of God and features vultures in “In the Garden of Eden.” Still she surprises these readers with an unusual take on the giant birds that sometimes cause anxiety in humans when they come upon carrions gathered on highway roadkill:
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.
They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.
And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.
Here is a poet’s poet, one who brings poets and other readers to the point of redemption and reminds all of us that “…poetry is best at howling/it’s the only way to say the unsayable.” This is what St. Germain does without mawkishness or hopelessness, bringing readers to a deep appreciation of her undaunted spirit.
Sheryl St. Germain is a native of New Orleans and is of Cajun and Creole descent. She is now retired from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA where she taught poetry and creative non-fiction and is noted for her work as co-founder of the Words Without Walls program.
*Published by Autumn House Press.
