I Need the Long March
When I was my grandmother's mother I knewshe would be beautiful in the time of warso I set to knitting hera whole skein of swansin flawless V formationpearl-coloredto match her skin,steadfast guides for the long marchI sewed coins and jewelry into the hem of her dresscopal, charms, carnelian and ashinto her long sleevesand when my fear for her life was biggerthan my loveI released her to the steppes and flewabove it all, above the war, grasslandssnowfields, past the small horsesand the gray wolves
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- September 11, 2024
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From General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz. (c) 2023 by Parlor Press. https://parlorpress.com/products/general-release-from-the-beginning-of-the-world
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Donna Spruijt-Metz’s debut poetry collection is General Release from the Beginning of the World (2023, Free Verse Editions). She is an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. She was featured as one of ‘5 over 50 debut authors’ in Poets & Writers Magazine (11/23). Her chapbooks include Slippery Surfaces, And Haunt the World (with Flower Conroy). and Dear Ghost (winner, 2023 Harbor Review Editor’s prize). Her poems appear or are forthcoming on The Academy of American Poets website, and in the Tahoma Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her new book, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace is forthcoming from Wildhouse Publishing in 2025.
Anderson, South Carolina
"Stitched equally with wit, tenderness, and the grace of longing, the poems of General Release from the Beginning of the World reinvigorate the metaphysical tradition for our still-new century. Donna Spruijt-Metz riffs on the very Psalms that she also interrogates, seeking answers from a genderless, nameless deity here referred to only as YOU-answers to the question of hauntedness ("the endless repetition/of the first loss"), of what it means to be haunted by a father's death, by a mother's lies about that death. "[R]eel me through, catch me/on the other side/with YOUR hidden hands," says Spruijt-Metz, addressing a deity as elusive as her father himself. These brave poems prove their own way forward to the difficult doubleness of truth: it can set you free, but, first, it'll break your heart. These impressive poems will, too."
—Carl Phillips
"The poems in this collection show it is possible for a poet to be in direct conversation with God, herself, and us, the readers, as if we were all sitting down at the same table, passing the salt. Intimate and holy, stripped down to their most essential moving parts, they bring us into their world of kinetic curiosity and restless grief. 'The real work,' these poems proclaim, 'is taming the whirring/ distance between us-/ Come close.'"
—Danusha Laméris
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