Cement Shoes - Judy Ireland (Evening Street Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Cement Shoes.  Judy Ireland.  Evening Street Press.  Dublin, Ohio.  2014.

Reading Judy Ireland's Cement Shoes is a little like sitting down with the best friend you have, you know the one I mean, the one that will cotton no bullshit.  Naturally they have a great sense of humour, otherwise how could they be trusted.  Friends like Ireland will say the hard thing.

Today's book of poetry was fully committed from the start.  Ireland's honesty is as vibrant as it is illuminating.

January - Dry Run Creek

Every year Dry Run Creek

is fed by January thaw.

Every year a boy falls

through the ice,

struggles for air,

too cold for words.

Every year they try

to revive him.

It almost never works.

You could line up all the mothers

on the bank, shoulder to shoulder.

With one breath

you could make them fall

like dominoes.

...

These poems can be haunting, when Ireland opens the gate her lament in tangible, the reader feels it in their bones.  These poems crawl over the catacombs of family, they damned near drown on remorse tinged loss, but they are always startlingly clear.

Ireland's Cement Shoes has poems filled with such delicate and endearing love and loss that your throat tightens and your mouth dries.  These frank poems sting.

Turning Fifty

I take my years to bed with me,

make room beneath my best-intentioned covers,

throw my arm across

and feel the lumpy consistency

of a life's body, aging.

I gather myself in -- restless limbs,

eyes that look for faces

that haven't seen light in years.

There were summers, before breasts,

when I played outdoors without a shirt.

Every third year, the lilac bush bloomed large,

and the liquid light-purple smell came in

through my bedroom window.

There were hard winters, when ice broke the surface

of everything, and frost made cruel floral patterns

on the glass outer door. There were years when

people died, and we kept putting on dresses.

This night will be too short.

I have save no one I intended.

...

Cement Shoes is solid, one of our biggest compliments here at Today's book of poetry.  Each and every poem in the collection is solid enough that you can step on it, by the end of this rock solid collection the reader has moved to higher ground, clearer perspective.

I felt emotionally involved with these poems from the first pages, invested.  I passed Cement Shoes around the office for our morning read.  Milo, who has taken a vow of silence, nodded his assent.  Our new intern Kathryn, who up until now has been as silent as Marcel Marceau, said that these poems "were some of the saddest sweet she'd ever gotten under her nails."  Then she kicked Milo's chair is an oddly gentle gesture of solidarity.

People used to sit up all night with the dead

so here I sit with you. No body, just your ghost,

probably waiting for me to make a move, like the girls

who used to fuck with me in high school, who waited

and then jumped around corners

as I walked, deep in thought.

I should get up and go to bed

but I cherish these throat-stopped hours

when grief is new, and it takes a chisel

to mark off the minutes, divide one day from another.

Time splits into before, and after.

When you can't sleep, my yoga teacher says,

lie down and find the place where your spine

needs a twist. Lie down, see where the truth

lies. As if it's somewhere in between

the box spring and the mattress.

I'm sitting here, saving up things I would tell you,

if you were to wake. I'd tell you what a brave

girl I was, how I knelt in the dirt, cupped a grasshopper

in my hands and let that green bug spit tobacco juice

all over my fingers. I'd tell you about the time

my sister and I sat face to face and touched tongues

for what seemed like hours, until a spark

of electricity flew between our two upper lips,

and we jerked apart, for forever.

...

Today's book of poetry is now a big admirer of Judy Ireland.  These honest poems can walk into any room and take a seat at the table.

Judy Ireland

photo by: Roosevelt

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Judy Ireland’s poetry benefits from the verdancy and barefaced authenticity of the Midwest's working class culture, which keeps her work grounded and focused in the ordinary world, where extraordinary ideas reside with great subtlety and power. Her work is also influenced by the lush excesses of South Florida, where she currently lives and works. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Hotel Amerika, and other journals.

BLURBS

Early in Judy Ireland’s debut collection, in “Lot’s Wife,” the speaker laments “how unfair it was/to turn her into a pillar of salt when all she was doing/was looking.” Daring to look back carries risks—whether it’s seeing an Iowa landscape where “Seven AM hog reports on the radio” become a young girl’s “cement shoes” or a father who “voted for Nixon” and whose “shame for me/was a big flashlight” nonetheless lives on “in the dim sun/of my yearning”—but so does looking at the present carry risk, for a lover may suddenly announce as if she were “someone saying, ‘I’m partial to strawberries’” that she’s “afraid of dying.” Risk is everywhere in this collection—the rewards are these wonderful poems.

     —Stephen Gibson, author of Rorschach Art Too, 2014 Donald Justice Prize winner

Judy Ireland grew up wild with her sisters and their corn silk hair, barefoot in the dark Iowa earth. In the title poem of this beautiful collection, Cement Shoes, we hear the poet’s brother from his Harley tell her, … “your soul is different,/ your soul is full of books, / and your feet are in cement shoes.” He couldn’t be more right … cement carrying the landscape of Iowa, the land, the creeks, the earth, and the girls growing up among the rows of corn, whose “hair hung down, crazy silks among the rows; / banshees in the corn, …/. Here are lines that resonate long after reading these strong and radiant poems envisioned with an eye as clear as you might imagine an Iowa sky sees in reflection. Here is a poet grounded in her Iowa as in her poems … observant, wry and beautiful lines that weave to water’s edge, from Dry Run Creek, to New Orleans, to New York and back to Iowa … the poet tells us, “I have come so far from Iowa / only to find it in my body. / The blackest dirt on earth and I am every inch and acre of it./ bones planted deep, where no light nor rain can reach. The tall corn grows … and still my hair grows / like prairie.” This wildness pressing the edges of her lines, compels the poet’s voice in this gorgeous body of work. 

     —Susan R. Williamson, Director, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, author of Burning After Dark,           winner of the Hannah Kahn 25th Anniversary Chapbook Prize.

To hear Judy Ireland read some of her poems go to the following link:

http://www.eveningstreetpress.com/judy-ireland-2013.html 

eveningstreetpress.com

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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