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(More customer reviews)Pris Campbell dares to go where others fear to tread, and it is that mindset of honesty that drives her journal about a boat journey along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Florida, July to November, 1977 into a very special poetic work. The book is written on several levels: first, this is a mariner's log, a personal journal, an examination of the motivations for a prolonged voyage in the midst of a relationship that is rocky, a book of maps and sea jargon, and second it is a collection of poems written as the heart's response to the voyage nautical and emotional. It works splendidly well.
The mariner log of the book is fine reading for those with adventurous hearts such as Campbell who, like Melville and Conrad before her, are passionate about the great waters of the sea. And just as in the writings of those men, the expanse of salt air wafting through the crevices of the body somehow frees the spirit to mourn, to long for, to breathe romance. Campbell has the gift for relating the needs for sensual pleasures along side the quiet hurt when those pleasures are incomplete. The man with whom Campbell travels is the echo of a relationship soured and in ways the author hopes that the time alone, the element of being out on the sea without the distractions of living ashore, may possible heal the rifts. But her poetry tells us otherwise. An excerpt from 'Streaking': 'I want him inside me before weighing anchor,/ certain Neptune will rise, enraged and hungry,/ out of those black jersey seas/to swallow us whole on this long night run/ from Manisquan to Atlantic City./ I pull him into me hard --wild animals rutting/in this coffin-like cabin, feet kick yes/ to seawater slosh outside./We stopped making love months ago./ Now we just use each other's bodies/ to unleash out fears and occasionally/ discover buried treasure.'...etc
She can wax eloquent about sights along the way of the passage, time ashore for supplies, etc, and in these poems she is both a painter of atmosphere and a vessel of vulnerability:
Charleston
Shore houses are fitted with Widows walks,
railed rooftop platforms where women once
watched the heaving horizon for their men to return.
Listen closely and you can hear a skirt rustle,
the occasional tread of women's feet.
The city is a Monet painting.
Flowers are sold on street corners by black women,
hair bound in scarves the color of butterflies.
The old South still folds into itself and endures.
We wander into what we think is a public garden,
sit breathing pink blossoms, legs sprawled.
An elderly man in a blue blazer, dollar bills hovering
in speech bubbles over his head, asks us to leave.
We trudge back onto pastel street in faded jeans,
sailing hats encrusted with sea salt.
Bt mid-afternoon, we hold hands.
Some days forgiveness comes easier than others.
It drifts in on white magnolia blossoms.
To share more of Pris Campbell's SEA TRAILS would be akin to walking into a darkened movie house in the middle of a drama. This book is satisfying on all levels and easily convinces us of the mind and talent of a very gifted lady. Spend time on this voyage of body and spirit and discover the universals that fill every page. Grady Harp, August 11
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Sea Trails: Poems and 1977 Passage NotesWe never see things in themselves, only things as they appear to our own particular sensibilities, moods, and associations.Nowhere is that clearer than in poetry, and nowhere in poetry is that clearer than in Pris Campbell's new book, Sea Trails.Part travelogue and part poetic narrative, the book brilliantly counter-poses poetic revelations of the speaker as she moves from "in love" to "out of love" and prose descriptions of a journey down the American Intracoastal Waterway, including details of the physical workings of the journey and of the landscapes which sustain her.An emotional, sensual, and visceral joy to read. Scott Owens
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