Harborless / Cindy Hunter Morgan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Morgan, Cindy Hunter, author.

Series:

Made in Michigan writers series.

Made in Michigan writers series

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--21st century.

American poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (pages cm)

Place of Publication:

Detroit, Michigan : Wayne State University Press, [2017]

Summary:

Poetry that recounts Great Lakes shipwrecks through imagination and history. Harborless, a collection of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, is part history and part reinvention. The poems explore tragic wrecks in rivers and lakes, finding and forming artistic meaning from destruction and death. Each poem begins in a real, historical moment that Cindy Hunter Morgan transforms into an imagined truth. The imaginative element is essential to this work as it provides a previously unseen glimpse into the lives affected by shipwrecks. The poems in Harborless confront the mysteries surrounding the objects that cover the floor of the Great Lakes by both deepening our understanding of the unknown and teaching great empathy for a life most of us will never know. Morgan creates a melodic and eerie scene for each poem, memorializing ships through lines such as, "Fishermen wondered why they caught Balsam and Spruce / their nets full of forests, not fish, " and "They touched places light could not reach." Most of the poems are titled after the name of a ship, the year of the wreck, and the lake in which the ship met disaster. The book's time frame spans from wrecks that precede the Civil War to those involving modern ore carriers. Throughout this collection are six "Deckhand" poems, which give face to a fully imagined deckhand and offer a character for the reader to follow, someone who appears and reappears, surfacing even after others have drowned. Who and what is left behind in this collection speaks to finality and death and "things made for dying." Very little is known when a ship sinks other than the obvious: there was a collision, a fire, a storm, or an explosion. Hunter works to fill in these gaps and to keep these stories alive with profound thoughtfulness and insight. Tony Hoagland said that one of the powers of poetry is to locate and assert value. This collection accomplishes that task through history and imagination, producing lake lore that will speak to historians and those interested in ships, poetry, and the Great Lakes.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Deckhand: Scent Theory

Henry Steinbrenner, 1909

W. W. Arnold, 1869

Erie, 1841

Chicora, 1895

Rouse Simmons, 1912

Philadelphia, 1893

J. Oswald Boyd, 1936

Deckhand: Sound Theory

Myron, 1919

Charles S. Price, 1913

Superior, 1856

Daniel J. Morrell, 1966

Phoenix, 1847

Pewabic, 1865

Brewster, 1943

Deckhand: Game Theory

Two Hundred Forty-Seven Ships, 1926

Lady Elgin, 1860

Henry Clay, 1851

William Nottingham, 1913

Hattie Taylor, 1880

Francisco Morazan, 1960

J. Barber, 1871

Deckhand: Dream Theory

Waldo, 1913

Sidney E. Smith, Jr., 1972

Columbia, 1859

J. R. Sensibar, 1939

Mataafa, 1905

St. Lawrence, 1878

Independence, 1853

Deckhand: Color Theory

Carl D. Bradley, 1958

Mesquite, 1989

Omar D. Conger, 1922

Wisconsin, 1929

Nameless

Alpena, 1880

Deckhand: Word Theory

Notes

About the Author.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780814342435

0814342434

OCLC:

972159296