Campo Santo: Poems

By Susan Wood

Book Overview

Susan Wood draws on her own past to create poems that are remarkable for their depth and clarity, and for the stories they tell. In Campo Santo, she chooses grief over nothingness and constructs tales out of her own lost world, the retrieval system of memory.

Wood's lyrical narratives chart the intimacies and distances between people. She writes about the pleasures and sorrows of family relationships, about the death of her mother, about the agonies of race in a small town, about the inconsolabilities of grief and the consolations of poetry.

But for all the sorrows in these poems, there are also odd moments of joy and celebration the world caught and transfigured, recovered. "We all deserve some sweetness in the end," Wood tells us.

The poems in Campo Santo demonstrate Wood's confident mastery of poetic technique. With this collection she takes her place as a mature, accomplished poet.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807116769
• ISBN13: 9780807116760
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Unbelieveably poignant.

The epigraph of this book is from Faulkner's The Wild Palms: "Between grief and nothing, I'll take grief." This pretty much sums up Wood's sensibility throughout these poems. This book, quite frankly, is one of the most beautiful books I own. Maudlin, but not overly so, this book's poems deal with grief and loss and longing. Particularly moving is the title poem, which deals with the death of the son of a friend. In the poem, Wood wonders, "Which is the greater sorrow / to feel you cannot live without him / or to find, after all, that you can?" This is a devastating book.