Talking Leaves Scrapbook, poems --by Vivian Mary Carroll

 Publisher: Casa Urraca Press (June 11, 2024)

Paperback: 108 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1956375169

Native American Poetry, Poetry by Women

5 Stars

 

Beginning with the first poem, I was captivated. She gives us a “Haibun for Buffaloes Beneath a Crescent Moon”—a short one paragraph prose poem followed by a haiku. The best history I’ve read of the taking of land by the dominant caste. 

 

Carroll’s poetry covers a lot of territory, and several of the roads, the trips, have also been made by me, and I love reading what she saw, what she wrote of things we both saw, but differently. She saw far more than I. And wrote beautifully about them. 

 

“Cherokee Sevens” is a whole new form to this reviewer. There are seven stanzas, each stanza has seven syllables, each syllable has its own line. A native version of a haiku? 

 

“Spacious Skies” gives us a glimpse of ‘rainy Puyallup’ and the Washington State Fair, and her trip to the Pacific Ocean. I love her descriptions of places I’ve visited often through the years. Her poems take us all over different times and places with a marvelously unique voice of a member of the Cherokee Nation.  

 

A beautiful book not to be missed. It belongs by your bed, or wherever you read. It belongs on your bookshelf. It belongs in your hands as you read and re-read the poems.