Rooms : New and Selected Poems

Speaking out of the known world, this powerful selection of Glancy’s poems transforms experience through new narratives, mytholigising history and social crisis. Tackling themes of disruption, loss and heritage, these poems invoke a wide range of familial and animal personae and environments: we find ourselves guided to a land filled with hope.

Rooms is a collection of new and selected poems by Diane Glancy. The rooms are spaces from previous collections – spaces influenced by memory and the pull of the past on the present. This collection of poems walks a line between balance and imbalance and struggles for an alignment of fragmented experiences. It tries to put into perspective the disparities of survival. It seeks to reconcile history and a broken heritage that results from a collision of cultures. These poems, written from 1986-2004, include work from earlier collections, The Relief Of America, The Shadow''s Horse, Stones For A Pillow, (Ado)Ration, Boom Town, Lone Dog’s Winter Count, Iron Woman, One Age In A Dream, Offering, and a chapbook, Coyote’s Quodlibet. The title is taken from an idea, The Ames Room, which was a demonstration created by Dartmouth Professor Adelbert Ames in the 1940’s to show that we can look into an off-sided room, yet it will appear in proportion because the way we think something should be shapes our perception of it. If the mind is a trickster shaping the misshapen into a familiar form and setting upright what has been turned on its side, what does a lopsided perception do? Does it skew what is not skewed? What if history, in this case, Native American history, has been turned on its side? How does the off-sided perception of the vanquished warp normal experience? Rooms is a calling together of the tribes. These poems are a campground of voices in council.