Word: tamsen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some of the best poetry appears in the middle section of the book, "Desert." It is here that Tamsen's willingness begins to bitter. The impossibility of the odds finds expression in paradox: "we age in the youngest canyon; we fumble through/the same impassable passage." Hope finds outlet in dreams, signs and visions: a rainstorm on the ocean; a mirage of fellow travelers. Rock formations and vegetation come to stand for futility: "the children chase [Tumbleweed]/as though they were chasing/hoops or balls/the rootless chasing the rootless...
...Tamsen Donner's thoughts unfold subtly, over the thousands of miles that she journeys. All of the particulars of her honest, direct entries seem to elevate her to a principle. As Ruth Whitman has intended: "I thought of the journey in its literal sense as a typical American sequence, moving from innocence to disaster; and as a woman's history, moving from dependence to courageous selfhood." (quoted from Radcliffe Quarterly...
Whitman became interested in pioneer life through a larger interest in mortality and survival. She chose Tamsen Donner partly because of their similarities: both poets, teachers and married more than once. Through reading numerous accounts of the Donner party trip, and by traveling the route herself, Whitman hoped to get inside her persona...
...SUCCEEDED. Tamsen Donner is both the exact detailing of one woman's movement toward death and rebirth, and a proud, universal protest against decay, as represented by George Donner's "festering wound." Without ever descending to self-pity Tamsen asks: "Must we devour ourselves/in order to survive?" She replies: "I cannot see/how I could bear to live/by eating my friend's death...
...Tamsen realizes that "[the West] is not a fixed but a floating line" (from the front of the book), and that "If my boundry stops here/I have daughters to draw new maps on the world...they will speak my words...