Black Loam
Finalist, Oregon Book Award for Poetry
Praise
Maxine Scates’ Black Loam maps the difficult choices forced upon us all—which wounds to deepen in order not to forget, which wounds to will into healing. In a world often filled with squalor and cruelty, Scates does not find redemption, but finds survival, and maybe finally that is all the redemption that’s out there for us. These clear-eyed, frank, hard-hitting poems demonstrate a careful attention to the things of the world. Scates wisely knows when to slow down to paint her layered, textured images. She recognizes the penetrating moments that change our lives in an instant. Scates is there when the veil is lifted. In fact, I often feel that she is the one doing the lifting.
Jim Daniels
Black Loam is a quietly compelling collection of poems the steady pulse of which is the psychic drive toward maturation. Its obsessive return to certain luminous or devastating moments of childhood is dynamic, however, not prevaricating, steadily subjecting those crystalline memories to the powers of the now. Chief of these are mind and the intimate, almost personal apprehension of the natural world. The dark river that we—as poets–used to expect to swallow poets whole—brilliant, crippled children to the end—is the tow Scates rows against with every pull of her oars. Black Loam’s poems are rich and disciplined, concerned with psychic landscape not as a naturalist or a photographer might be, but as the saving site of a mythic strenuous journey home.
Linda McCarriston
Reviews
Scates’ strand of narrative poetry emboldens the poet to pierce through ordinary human relationships, particularly the institutions that use power to negatively influence the poor, or disenfranchised. She shows us that our lives are complexly wound around oppositions such as good and evil, pride and shame, autonomy and dependency. She shows us how the human family is related by its eruptions into dark impulses and temptations just as it is connected by its good intentions and generosity.
Judith Harris, Prairie Schooner
My favorite poem, one which I’ve heard Scates read twice, is ‘The Mothers,’ a lengthy, layered work about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships—all that was, all that will never be—and the understanding ‘how if being born is forgetting, / living a life is remembering / all you’ve forgotten.’
Lois Wadsworth, The Eugene Weekly
Black Loam is an important illumination of narratives too often excluded from the poetic tradition. Maxine Scates transforms silence into a language of empowerment as she uncovers the profound ways the consequences of social injustice are deeply embedded in women’s lives. In this new collection, Scates complicates the stories already presented in Toluca Street, demonstrating the perpetual presence of the shame associated with her class background and the pain inflicted by domestic abuse.
Sarah Seybold, Calyx