BRENDA SEROTTE
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 Poemas de Peru and Other Places, Too "As a child, Brenda Serotte learned early on about poetry's restorative powers, and she shares that sustenance and solace with us now in poems that are clear-eyed and gently knowing. With wise humor she understands how few constancies remain besides family, yet how the line between nurturance and suffocation is always perilously thin. And, Whitman-like, she celebrates the body, that map of our tribe, even as it balks into middle age and beyond. Poignant, rueful, funny, these memoirs in verse herald an exceptional talent and a highly accomplished debut." --Peter Schmitt, author of Country Airport, and Hazard Duty.  COVER |
The Blue Farm "The poems in Brenda Serotte’s The Blue Farm range across a wide and vivid landscape of loves and cultures, losses and revelations. Each of these probing, honest poems is informed by a profound sense of history, of family, of culture. They have been gathered here into a collection that truly feels larger than the sum of its parts, as each poem resonates against its companions to form a self-portrait of a rich and varied life, drawn by a woman of gracious individuality." --Michael Hettich, author of Flock and Shadow: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press, 2005), and Swimmer Dreams (Turning Point, 2005). _____________________________________________________ THE BLUE FARM/ Riding down the Central Highway towards the Blue Farm, I ask why it’s called that, when an amber leaf floats past my nose settles on the seat, stem up, beside me. Like a passenger whose presence I acknowledge with unaccustomed quiet. Wedged between my bags and me the treasure rests. A brief encountered magic. I think of all I've hoarded for the gods: a firefly that flashed its signal code of light the day you died, the bunch of sweet cloves tied with crimson ribbon, one halved gray rock containing at its core striated pink. * * * At the Blue Farm, couples, friends, and families relax with drinks the size of Machu Picchu. I have my usual Pisco Sour, a powerful concoction I’ve grown fond of, while waiting for the chickens to be served— that's all there is to eat at Granja Azul, no meat, no fish. Meanwhile, little kids ride llamas round and round a sandy circle under watchful eyes of housemaids, white-uniformed for Sunday, who pull identical blue sweaters tight around their slender shapes against the August chill. Finally our dinners come. By this time, everyone is drunk. They introduce me to “the chief” of Lima’s striking miners, a man, they whisper, who’s important. As we chat, I spot the waiters by the trash, eating, drinking everything left over on our tray. Later in the week, word comes: the chief’s been kidnapped. Disappeared. And not long after, news that he is dead. *** The Iroquois believe we reappear after we die, in different shapes and forms. The presence of this amber leaf, its fragile symmetry, a delicate reminder. Beauty reproduced a thousandfold each autumn until vanished. Leaves like this we hunted for, placed carefully in separate pockets to be carried home to trace painstakingly with sharpened pencils, on winter afternoons when we were young. |
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