I tell you, she sang her children to sleep when they were little, & this music enters her lines. Humanity’s behavior does not escape her maternal tough love, even despairing outcry. She observes the earth, down to quotidian pebbles on her path, & upward to dried leaves on knurled dying trees as dusted air descends. Above all a thinker, she is wise, modest, sometimes slyly funny. She chisels and cherishes her language-its tenses studied and taut. Carroll, author of Something Is Bound to BreakĬharlotte Muse’s poetry is remarkable because Charlotte Muse is a remarkable person. Mortal life and carries the reader into a world of sublime mystery. Hovering in the background is the rush of time. This world is real as rock and stone or a leaf drifting down river or a dead rat and yet magical as moonlight on an owl’s wing or the sound of medieval music made from wood and gut. Jeanne Du Prau, author of the City of Ember seriesĬharlotte Muse’s poetry presents a unique and brilliant sense of the natural world, which places human experience shared with a multitude of creatures. You will feel more intensely the world you live in, reading these poems. The words are exact and unexpected, never careless, always particular: frog and owl, stone and moon, boy at the bottom of a hole, violin, rattlesnake. They are about everything the in world, as seen by a poet who loves the world, its beauties and its horrors as well-the whole world, as it is now and as it has been at other times. Praise for Charlotte Muse & In Which I Forgive the River: The closing poem describes a photograph of a lost world, of Europe in 1909, a watch “Always ticking closer to Sarajevo and the great war and the war after that and / the ends of so many worlds.” Like Solorsano, Muse writes of, and from, the ends of worlds – but perhaps, also, the possibilities of new ones. You’re the one whose heart was broken or awakened. Still, she writes of hope that we can learn from such experiences: Mourning the dead bodies of frogs dissected in biology classrooms occasions a plea for forgiveness from all the world: “Whatever a fish wants to do / takes the whole fish” she observes – such concise advice for living. She finds this gift in animals, many of which appear here, snakes and rats and pigs and bees. Later, writing of a living owl flying over a mountain lake, she longs to see with the bird’s eyes: “I’ll watch until mine, too, see wide / all the way to the other side.” The other side of life, that is. Her opening poem, “Why You’re Afraid of the Road,” answers that it might be the impulse to leave the world – “what if you just drove off the edge / because you were tired of all / curves and wanted to lie on air?” This thought is echoed in the title poem, forgiving the river even as it carries her away, “giving up my own motion… / Already I’m dissolving in the world.” Writing of “Last Days,” she imagines the earth opening to disgorge the souls of the dead, so many that one walks through them like a projection: “there’s no sensation, but there’s a shadow on you, / and for a moment, a face replaces / your face.” If this sounds morbid, it’s not – merely another way of seeing the world, or of seeing between worlds.Īnd yet another way is through animals, beginning with the image of an owl painted on a cave wall thirty thousand years ago, left in darkness, perspective frozen in stone: “Doesn’t everything want to take in more of the world?”, she asks, for the owl and for us.

This sets the tone for Charlotte Muse’s poetry, taking the form of a literary expedition, at times anthropological, at others anthropomorphic, through many lives, many times, historical past and personal past, bodies human and animal, flesh and spirit – so much Many of the poems in this collection are inspired by stories told by Ascension Solorsano de Cervantes, a descendant of indigenous people in what became California, and the last fluent native speaker of the Mutsun language.

Muse of poetry