Tribe
Martha Courtot
…Tribe, published in 1977, offers eleven poems that integrate hard daily truths as they link emotions with the natural world. Like most of Courtot’s work, they describe a world of imagination and spirit. She envisions cultural myths to provide a context for living. Echoing the French writer Monique Wittig, she says, “If there is no history, I can invent it.” “What is a woman? What woman?” she asks, and answers, “Hush. Stone knows.” In Tribe, Courtot’s poems are somewhat “longer and fatter” than other work of this period. Several, including the title poem, are printed in prose. The fourth poem of this collection, an untitled homage to her mother, is unusually factual, “i could always tell when she was home / by the cigarette cough walking down the drive / that cough was a caress to me.” The image is of a single mother who managed to love her children against the odds. The mother’s self-destructive smoking is seen as an effect of living in a woman-hating society. Courtot repeats this blend of love and pain again and again. She returns to the mother-daughter theme in her middle work, much of which was dedicated to making life different for her daughters…’ ~ Adrienne Lauby
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Details
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publication Date | 1977 |
| Publisher | Pearlchild |
| Format | Softcover |
| No. of Pages | 28 |
| LoC Classification | PS3553.O86 .T75 1977 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| BookID | 15312 |
