White Ermine Across Her Shoulders
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Auschwitz, E. Poland January 27, 1945 Deep January never felt so warm— when the strong arms of the Red Army picked up the skeleton-like people and set them on blankets in the snow. The evil snake had reached down deep into their bodies and tried to snatch their very souls, but the soldiers gathered them like sick dogs in their arms and set them into the sunshine. Libertacja was like the swinging of a thousand swings up into the air— a day when poetry began to be written. Celestial Bird: The Poem One became caught last night in my net. This morning I untangled him— eyes true and bright, magnificent iridescent feathers, and a warm beating heart that stayed in my hand as I threw him up into the air so he could continue his flight across the universe.
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About the Book
White Ermine Across Her Shoulders has all the elements expected by readers of Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry. The lines are highly imagistic and intense. Descriptions of the earth’s beauty are intermingled with comments, sometimes caustic, about the human experience. Often a music rises that is both emotional and filled with language and insights that remain in the memory long after the book has been put down. This, Davis’s second volume, speaks eloquently about Kevin Michael Davis, her son who died of cancer in 2010 in Poughkeepsie, NY, and touches on other family relationships, making some of the poems more personal than those she has published before. These poems are balanced with an understanding of the universe and all of its creatures that encompasses both delight and wisdom. What makes this collection appealing is an intellectual depth that resonates, in the way of Emily Dickenson, with the imagistic and emotional core that has always been a hallmark of Davis’s poetry.
About the Author
Ethel Mortenson Davis lives in the mountain community of Continental Divide, NM. She has published one other book of poetry, I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico. Trained as an artist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, her poetry is intensely visual, demonstrating the same life, color, and movement found in her pastels. A member of the Zuni Mountain Poets, her poetry has influenced a number of New Mexico poets, and they have influenced her. Her lines have a beautiful simplicity concentrated on the magical landscape of New Mexico, evoking the high desert, piñon trees, mountains, and the Native, Latino, and Anglo residents of the area. She was raised on a dairy farm not far from Wausau, Wisconsin.