Essays, Women's Biography, US & Canadian Literary Biography, Women's Biography, Literary Figures - Women's Biography
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Overview
Feeding off the otherworldly mythos of New Orleans and the surrounding southern swampland, St. Germain stirs up the past - both her own and Louisiana's - to create Swamp Songs, a memoir that bursts with pain and redemption. From the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras to the Cajun prairies of French Louisiana, these essays taste of loss: the loss of wild open places papered over with fast food restaurants and retail stores, the loss of father and brother to the embrace of addiction, the loss of self through risk and rebellion. And yet the leaven of hope works throughout to raise the possibility of salvation found speaking truthfully about our lives.Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Landscape shapes this collection of essays by the New Orleans-born and bred poet St. Germain (The Journals of Scheherazade). While her family has all the earmarks of a troubled one-"drugs, alcoholism, sex, murder, suicide"-their tale is merely the frame within which St. Germain has constructed a memoir of and dirge for a place: Louisiana. St. Germain brings these essays together with little disjunction and few repetitions. In her telling, family data are often blurry and family versions of events can differ (e.g., why and how Grandfather shot his eye out). Place, however, is unmistakable and tangible. St. Germain's passionate commitment to place is the lens through which she conveys the specialness of growing up in the Louisiana swampland, where Christmas celebrations, amusement parks, meals and even fishing are as ordained by the landscape as hurricanes, which can wreak "almost one and a half billion dollars worth of damage," and Mardi Gras, that time when the uptown streets become so clogged St. Germain sits on her friend's shoulders, "lifted high and parentless above the swaggering crowds." St. Germain succeeds in simultaneously offering a sensitive memoir and an homage to Louisiana's swamps, the people who dwell near them and New Orleans. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
January 14, 2003
Publisher
Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, c2003.
Pages
219
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780874807431