In The Light Between, award-winning poet Terry Blackhawk probes beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk's poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between celebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world. 
Section one opens as Blackhawk visits a lonely mythical kingdom and introduces images of an empty bed and the betrayed wife Medea, whose identification with nature signals one of the book's main motifs. Section two presents deeply personal poems that flutter through time and lingering memories, while in section three, the gaze of the poet turns upward and outward to nature. Section four returns to the social world-to the street, traffic, visual art, and teaching-which poses the possibility of love once more. Section five celebrates the union of man and woman with some tender (and sometimes comical) love poems. Throughout, Blackhawk addresses heavy issues such as divorce and solitude, but also shows a playful side with lighthearted poems. She describes an imaginary meeting with poet laureate Billy Collins in one poem, and in another writes about finding a dried-up eggplant while sweeping the kitchen. 
Whether writing about the intricacies of loss or our connection to nature and one another, she manages-like the speaker with the decayed fruit in "The Eggplant"-to "poke around and find the beauty of it." Students and teachers of writing and fans of poetry will enjoy this beautifully crafted collection.

The Light Between (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

Literature & Fiction

Blackhawk, Terry

Poetry

Wayne State University Press

The poems in Terry Blackhawk's first collection of poetry enable the reader to enter a realm that is prelinguistic, where self dissolves and sight and sound, nature and identity, intermingle. The paradox inherent in these poems is that the poet's precise use of language, of imagery, of metaphor expresses a physical, sensual celebration of life and loss. Blackhawk frequently makes use of myth to show how the animal within us moves in and with the natural world.

Body & Field

Michigan State University Press

Poetry. Terry Blackhawk's poetry collections include Trio: Voices from the Myths; Body & Field; ESCAPE ARTIST, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize; and a Greatest Hits chapbook from Pudding House Press. Blackhawk's poems have appeared in many journals with reviews of her books in CALYX, Poet Lore, Booklist, ForeWord and American Book Review. In 1990 she was named Michigan's Creative Writing Teacher of the Year. In 1992-1993 she received a National Endowment for the Humanities sabbatical award to study Emily Dickinson and later published several articles in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. In 1995, while still teaching for Detroit Public Schools, she founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a writers in schools organization. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, an artist-in-residence grant from Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Governor's Award for Arts Education, a Detroit Metro Times Progressive Hero Award and the United Black Artists Pioneering Teacher in the Arts Award. Terry Blackhawk is a graduate of Antioch College. She holds a Ph.D. in Reading and Language Arts Education from Oakland University and is a founding board member of WITSA, the national Writers in the Schools Alliance.

The Dropped Hand

Marick Press

The Dropped Hand is an attempt to create poetry that lives in the face of loss. The poems in the second and third of the book's four sections respond directly to two major strokes: the stroke that robbed author Terry Blackhawk's father of his ability to read or write and left him with a limited capacity for verbal expression; and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed Blackhawk's mother not long thereafter.Underlying the poems in The Dropped Hand is an unspoken echo of Keats's famous fragment: "This living hand . . ." The book's two central metaphors-the hand (the hand that plays or is played, that signals, that makes music, that connects us to one another) and the bridge of language and interaction-interplay, bounce off, and resonate with one another throughout the book. The bridge also spans water-the unconscious, the unifying mystery-which is a recurring motif and connects the first and last sections of the book.Blackhawk's poems display a range of form, including prose poems, sonnets, sestinas, and invented forms. Elegy is a central impulse of the poems in this book. Another is to heal, retrieve and recover language-whether broken by grief or lost to stroke and aging-to create in words something that will last. The first section of the book ("Over the Stage") entwines motifs of animals, art and spectacle-elephants, horses, turtles, and fish mix with visual art, circus, theater, poetry, and film-with childhood, preparing in a sense the way for the losses of the mother's music and the father's language.Linda Gregerson writes, "Death gains on us. It honors neither time nor place nor human quest for meaning. Its emblem might be, as it is in these fine elegies, a dropped hand of playing cards: 'abrupt and final / silence.' If that were all, the bravery of the poet would be much, but Terry Blackhawk wrests from this strict vista a powerful antithesis. With patience and wisdom and, above all, with love, she crafts the vessel that counters dissolution."

Poetry. "Terry Blackhawk's poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you. You can read and re-read them, marveling at their construction and arrested by insights you missed the first time which then sneak up on you. Blackhawk's poems make you know, with a touch so light you hardly realize you are being tapped on the shoulder, that you are in the presence of the best poetry: multi-leveled, passionate, varied, thoughtful, intense, and beautiful. ESCAPE ARTIST always conveys the sense that limits and boundaries free us as they define us. It is a harvest of a book, mature work, and its voice carries the zesty suggestion of more poems to come" --Molly Peacock, 2002 Judge, John Ciardi Prize.

Escape Artist: poems

BkMk Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blackhawk, Terry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Blackhawk, Terry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blackhawk, Terry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Light Between (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

Body & Field

The Dropped Hand

The Dropped Hand

Escape Artist: poems