Title: Recovered Voices
Review: Susan Luther's poetry is accessible to anyone who has felt the precariousness, alongside the immediacy and joy, of close relationships. Hers is the voice of a mature writer who has absorbed and reabsorbed the experience of the "little girl" whose mother "bequeathed her the muse/ who disappeared beneath the magnolias" only to be recovered later through art. For Luther's characteristic persona, the disappearance of the muse permeates subsequent losses not just with grief, but with the possibility of invocation (from the magnolia, from the microwave, from fiddle music, from crickets and tree frogs). In paying her loved ones the tribute of words, she animates and is animated by the traces of their lives. In poems such as "Nuya Saligugi (Stone Turtle)" and "Sheaves," among others, she recovers and expands her mother's own words in "Return": "your voice,/ Eager as a bird's song at dawn,/ Has struck an answering note/ On the string I thought broken/ Long ago."
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