Color is the Suffering of Light

An acclaimed poet's memoir is a portrait of a young girl searching for meaning and beauty in a world of suffocating mother love, spiritual and physical poverty, alcoholism, and despair--with nature and the English language as her only allies.

"Language was a sunstruck, white-water river, full of aquamarine lagoons." Green (The Squanicook Ecologues), an award-winning poet, chronicles her family's epically difficult "unwritten history," while also telling the story of how one writer came to writing. Her memoir is exhilarating not only because she is able to characterize the violence, vigor and dismay of generations, but because Green demonstrates in virtually every sentence the power of words to restore a life that might otherwise have been wrecked by circumstance. She grew up a farmer's daughter during the 1960s in Townsend, Mass., in the household's "heavy, ponderous vapor of unspoken feelings." Resorting frequently to fairy tales, myths and dreams as narrative forms, Green travels in and through her family's legendary alcoholism, batterings and other extraordinary sufferings, including her own suicide attempt at eight and her paternal grandmother's repeated sexual overtures. But to sum up or redress a life's cruelties is not Green's point. Instead, she wrests control from hardship by fathoming it in a long and lavish burst of language. Her intelligence is harrowing-and ecstatic.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Poet Green, author of the award-winning Squanicook Ecologues (1988), has written a harrowing memoir of her difficult childhood growing up in a poverty-stricken family on a farm in western Massachusetts. Her father was an abusive drunk; her mother was frustrated and withdrawn; her grandmother smothered her with an attention that bordered on obsession and eventually resulted in sexual abuse. She felt so much the outsider within her own family that she began to weave an intense, complicated, fictional history of relatives she never knew in an attempt to forge a connection with them; whole chunks of this "history" appear within these pages. Presumably telling this story is cathartic for the author, but it is less so for the reader. So bleak is the narrative that we have to read in detail about Green's gruesome habit of cutting herself with her father's razor, a ritual that she says deadened her pain and provided an enormous sense of relief. Green claims that poetry saved her, and in an account that is almost too painful to read, she conveys hard emotion in the compressed, private, urgent language of the poet. Joanne Wilkinson

Growing up on a Massachusetts farm in the 1960s, poet Green (The Squanicook Eclogues, LJ 5/15/87) endured a painful and isolated youth. As she explains here, she sought refuge from her dysfunctional family and poor self-esteem by turning to writing, often making up stories about relatives and 19th-century fictional characters. Language became her friend, enabling her to create a happier world where she had some control. Green writes with exquisite detail and conveys her experiences vividly; her ability to use language with a poet's skill is the book's strongest asset. The narrative falters after the first few chapters, however, as Green's childhood drags on in isolation and pain, although it picks up again with the story of her great-grandparents' lives. Despite its bright spots, the sad story of abuse and alienation-so common in today's personal literature-dominates this memoir. For general readers.
Nancy R. Ives, Univ. of Geneseo, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.