In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an "old beige comb from home," the boundlessness of a "three-axled God"), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a cloth woven from disparate voices and structures, expressing both the deep divisions of the self and the longing for a whole that may be ultimately shaped.The convent, then prairie: stretchesitself across the Great Plains,grabs the bank of the Red River of the Northin one handand the Rockies in the otherand pulls: you can seeuntil your sight failsnothing elseis in the waywhere something other should bethere is only your darkeningsightresistancelike bone, filleted clean in the windwhich comesfrom everywhereFrom Motherhouse by Kathleen Jesme. Copyright 2004 by Kathleen Jesme. All rights reserved.

Motherhouse: Poems (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award)

Literature & Fiction

Jesme, Kathleen

Poetry

Pleiades Press

Fire Eater: Poems

Univ of Tampa

University of Tampa Press

Poetry. In her third book of poems, Kathleen Jesme asks what happens if the ordinary ways of knowing are taken away-if one is suddenly unable to see or hear, or has been stripped of the familiar past. What begins to show through when absence (or darkness) creates a different inner landscape? "THE PLUM-STONE GAME is a delicate reconstruction of sense-memory and its eros: with archeological precision Kathleen Jesme revitalizes the broken vessel of the world, giving us one beautiful version of its amphora after another. The poems hold; they retain light and joy and the fierce electric charges of the body. Here is a poet who has wearied of the ways in which language has been used to show us the impossibility of meaning. She is refreshingly unafraid of the sensual power of poetry, its difficulties, and its ability to comprehend the larger sphere of being"--D.A. Powell.

The Plum-Stone Game (New Series, 26)

Ahsahta Press

Poetry. A collection of tricksters from Anton Mesmer to the inexplicable gods of Ovid; fairy-tale characters and figures from memory; the white blanket of snow in the far north across which a small plane flies: these recurrent images haunt and populate Jesme's ALBEDO. "A small abyss becomes / larger with use," she writes, yet in examining the mostly ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways in which the individual comes to perceive and love the world, Jesme acknowledges a landscape of "dormancy for the duration" with poems that confront multiple mournings. "Poetry's truest measure is not language but time, and our best poetry reveals its trust in the paradox of its wordless foundation. 'Time does not enter it/ or does,' Kathleen Jesme writes, 'but in a slant way because/ words are history/ and hoax.' ALBEDO derives its considerable power from what it knows to be hoax and homestead at once, and time dwells in the book as sequence, as series, and as discrete lyric, its totality poignantly multiple in a measure made sacred by faith. A liturgical calendar counted out in weeks of weather and grief, trees and seasons, deaths and animals, this is a devotional book of hours bound in snow, a missal for those for whom 'god is organic/and arrives from the inside.'"—Brian Teare

Albedo (The New, 61)

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