Review by Art Goodtimes
Poetry – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man
Published in 1995 by La Alameda Press, Albuquerque
ISBN 0-9631909-7-0
Sofia
Published in 1999 by La Alameda Press, Albuquerque
ISBN 1-888809-11-6
Blessed Resistance
Published in 1999 by Mariposa Printing & Publishing, Santa Fé
ISBN
JOAN LOGGHE is easily one of the major lyric voices writing in the American Southwest these days.
She’s had several major collections of work published in the last decade, has won a prestigious NEA grant, and has appeared in a number of regional and national anthologies. Plus, she’s a seasoned performer of her work, and a celebrated teacher of writing.
I know, because I first heard her read at the first Talking Gourds Festival in Telluride back in 1989, doing a long poem about Pittsburgh. She had the packed Sheridan Opera House crowd eating out of her hand. And she’s been coming back to the event year after year to lead young poetry enthusiasts in brilliant workshops that pull the dancing bones of language out of personal skeletons of experience locked up in old closets and musty trunks.
So how does one born in Pennsylvania become, as poet Miriam Sagan has called her, “the true muse of New Mexico’s Española Valley”? As a transplant, Logghe has put down deep roots in her adopted Southwestern desert. Just as she has with her husband Michael. And it was out of that depth of both those soils that she wrote “Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man.”
These are not just the love paeans of longing and conquest and impossible joy, but that and more. They embrace the allure of everything outside oneself. Sugar orchids. Dark fiestas. The white mantle of a lantern. Yet, they do not shun love’s distractions. Annoyances. The things that drive one crazy.
In this collection Logghe is by turns defiant, and bitter like pure chocolate, but in the end sweetened by a love “too erotic to speak” in a marriage “that looms like immense foreplay for death.” This is a dazzling treatise of nimble lyrics and slow duende waltzes for seasoned as well as about-to-be couples, and it should be handed out with every new marriage certificate.
Similarly, Logghe wrote Sofia as a way to find her deepest Semitic self amid the beeswax and myrrh of New Mexico’s redolent Catholic mysticism. In a series of fine-crafted poems, she conveys the defining narrative moments in the life of a fictional crypto-Jewish Hispanic heroine.
A wandering Jew by heritage, Logghe has spent the last two decades in the rural village of La Puebla overcoming the resistances of place, family, and marriage to mature into a Sephardic majordomo of the Anglo acequia along New Mexico’s Rio Poesia. So it’s most fitting that the name of her latest book is Blessed Resistance.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS you learn in child development classes is that children, indeed all critters, learn best when there are obstacles to be overcome. The more obstacles, the more one learns. Which is why Logghe celebrates the struggles she’s experienced getting to know the sacred ground of her adopted home, and understanding the mysteries of sons and daughters and a faithful if foreign husband.
“You tap me like we tap / Maple for its rising blood,” she sings in “After Our Silver Anniversary,” and continues, “What are bodies but ground / for the birth of hearts?”
When a bear collides with her eldest daughter’s car “Outside Pagosa Springs,” she weaves the tale into a coming-of-age ritual, as in Ancient Greece where young women were given “a robe made of bear. A pelt to obscure / What men might see too soon and want, / Trained to grow their minds first.”
Speaking of the miracle of birth in “Surrender,” Logghe explains, “I was in love with fists / And knuckles. / It was surrender / As total as a country / Under white flags / Taken over by / legions of peace.”
I could go on quoting all night, poems delicate as desert sunsets and tough as chollo along the turquoise trail. But let me end with the book’s first poem as it is easily Logghe’s signature piece: “Something Like Marriage.”
Here she brings us into conversation with her passionate if thorny love affair with New Mexico: “I’m engaged to New Mexico. I’ve been engaged for 18 years / I’ve worn its rings of rainbow set with a mica shard … I’ve given New Mexico my back-East manners, my / eyesight, the arches of my feet. New Mexico’s a difficult / fiancé … It’s too large. It burps when it drinks beer. It leaves the / toilet seat up … I want to leave New Mexico, but it acts like it owns me … It / follows me everywhere like mesquite cologne.”
It is a dazzling poem in a dazzling collection. Consider the volume a gift appropriate for anyone who’s come to rootedness only after difficulty, or who’s found delight in overcoming the sacrifices inherent in sticking around. Highly recommended.
Art Goodtimes, who lives near Norwood and is a San Miguel county commissioner, is better known for his poetry. He and several other poets will present a reading at 8 p.m. on March 16 at La Frontera in downtown Salida. The event is free and open to the public, although the hat will be passed.