Resurrection Papers

by Heather Thomas

ISBN 0-925904-37-6, 64 pages, $15

from RESURECTION PAPERS:

In the Undifferentiated Country of Shadows

Would you like to dance? I’ve a book illustrating the stance.

In the first picture, her hand covers her mouth because the photographer likes the look. Years later, she does this unconsciously when she has something to say. In Russia, every tombstone has a picture of the dead.

Would you say your image contains or ruptures you?

Nuclear bombs line the seabed and a man walks the moon. Her child’s image emerges from a wave of sound. She thinks all that mourning was a form of anger or the way the brain’s biochemistry can make you sad.

Which memory is being yourself and which another?

She writes a procession of evocative captions: The child pouring water into the birdbath wears an olive-green dress trimmed in velvet. The dress has a pattern of small black scrolls.

When were the days that belief made words reach the dead?

Six hawks cruise over the river. The first three vanish on a rooftop hidden in trees. Others soar on wind above the rapids, wings tilting and balancing to ride the currents, dark bodies spread to light at the pale tips, dipping into the bare March thicket.

Shadows leap the gully, creek, median strip. That endless darkened hallway. In the thinning light of the garden, arborvitae make feathery sentinels.

Grandmother Kitty has taught her perfect enunciation. As the water turns milky, she steps on stick legs into the bath. By evening she is covered with soft gray feathers and makes a mournful sound.

Seeing ourselves from outer space, we are the alien.

Reviews:

Resurrection Papers is a book of transgression — the transgression of the individual subject by family and social strictures, the transgression through such death into existence, the transgression of language as prescription into language as desire. It is a book ultimately of freedom — of being set free through language.

The author writes:
Resurrection Papers is a hybrid poem sequence embracing the idea that to think and live consciously and passionately one must walk alongside death. The poems erupt from what I call a “convergence of urgencies” that allows anything into the charged moment of the poem and includes multiple forms. They occur as fragment, lyric, dramatic monologue, prose unfolding, and “found” journal entries, both narrative and disjunctive in style. I wanted a ritualistic feeling and drew on ritual and myth from several sources, including the Day of the Dead. I also drew on the contemporary myth-making form of news headlines, sometimes used aphoristically.

Resurrection Papers questions and renews the region between dream and wakefulness: Dream the space of sleep and death but also of one’s most fervent imaginings and desires. Language the utterance of desire, which might even “kill” a girl. The other side of language — silence, loss, absence — as it confirms her death. A woman’s waking must be a “difficult emergency.” Renewal occurs in part through the very medium that kills her. The sensuality and eroticism of desire in language enact this rebirth. I want this work to reinscribe through poetry a region in between life and death in order to reclaim a sense of the sacred and to restore it into the woven ongoingness of living and dying.