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From Publishers Weekly
Cader's title refers to the ghosts that populate almost every poem in this superior first collection. Searching for the nature of her identity--as a woman, lover, daughter and artist--the poet delves into the lives of family, friends, even strangers and, in the process, is able to see her own life as part of a continuum of meaning. Cader returns to her Central European origins, imagining what life was like for parents and grandparents fleeing the horror of war. The poet takes on her father's grief in "Return," which describes how he "cried into his hat" as the family left for America, and in "Ice Fishing," which details a fishing expedition during which his grandfather was killed by German gunfire. Cader also deals with the ghosts of old lovers in an attempt to make "peace / among the litter and decay." The masterwork of this volume, "At the Trenton State Hospital," examines the primordial longing for mother's love. The speaker of the poem calmly directs a game of bingo for a group of mental patients until one woman instigates a riot by standing on a table "shouting Mother! Mommy! like a child suddenly lost / on a familiar street, pointing at me and shouting / Mother!"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In Cader's poems it is clear that the traumas of Central Europe were not truly left behind by immigrants to America. In the confusion that flies like unsettled dust, the poet establishes an identity and finds a voice. With strong natural rhythms and familiar diction, she sifts through ancestry and history: "But the ink is smudged,/ the syntax archaic, the dialect known/ only in three villages, which were bombed./ Never has there been such suffering." The poems are rooted in a European consciousness, grand and far-reaching, with an exactness and clarity. Family is at the center of it all, its traditions and dreams. Truth is in the details: working at 16 in a dark garment factory, the girl thinks of an aunt fetching her from a train in Warsaw, "with her eau de cologne ,/ black-seamed stockings, fur hat." A worthy addition to most collections.
- Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Guests: Winner of the 1991 Ohio State University Press/the Journal Award in Poetry
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