A first collection of 14 stories that peoples a southwestern
landscape with female survivors of one kind of abuse or another. At
her best, Coleman can evoke the haunted landscape and the domestic
discord of a Frostian dramatic poem or the passionate bitterness of
a Lawrentian short story. "Sunflower" concerns a female narrator
and her husband Clay, who have found a weary acceptance of each
other after her passionate youth and catastrophic tryst with young
lover Miguel ("I never felt I could ask him [Clay] where the joy
went..."). Likewise, in "The Voices of Doves," the narrator, a
bereaved mother who lost her infant - one of many children - when
her illiterate helper oiled the baby accidentally with carbolic
acid, reaches a reconciliation with the girl after a lonely
recognition of a kind of fate that is bound up in the land: "There
is a violence in this soil, in the people who labor on it." "Mesa
Country," on the other hand, is sparse and Lawrentian: "We live in
tumult. Everyone." Other stories are more typically feminist and
lyrical in their intent and execution: "The Paseo" lovingly evokes
in "a silent marketplace" a promenade of women "wrapped around
their pearls" and a male narrator who wants to paint one of the
young beauties, but whose downfall involves both the local culture
and his own unacknowledged desires. In "The Ugliest Woman in the
World," the narrator runs off with wild macho man Buck, only to
come to her senses, faced with his selfishness, and leave him. A
woman in "Acts of Mercy" rides off on a horse to help a neighbor
faced with wild clogs - the men here are absent and finally
unnecessary. Coleman's stories - some published in such journals as
South Dakota Review and Puerto Del Sol - evoke a harsh natural and
man-dominated world where women sometimes become strong through
their suffering. (Kirkus Reviews)
An excerpt from Stories from Mesa Country: "They are coming back
from the burial ground. I can see them walking, two abreast, along
the narrow track by the wash. Tom has his head down, his hands in
the pockets of his black suit. Beside him, Reverend Sherman is
talking, waving his arms, trying, I'd guess, to comfort. Behind
them come Enid and Faith, square shapes in best blue dresses, and
then Seth and Arch, leggy as colts, uncomfortable in Sunday suits,
in the shadow of tragedy. Now a space, long seconds passing before
I see Luisa. She is alone, walking slowly. She is crying. I know
that, even from this distance, from my bed beside the window. She
wipes her eyes on her apron. Her shoulders heave. She has been
crying for three days. "I wish I could shout so they could hear me.
I wish the Reverend would go to her, assure her of her place in
heaven and in our house. I wish one of them, Tom or the children,
would take her by the arm, lead her home. Instead they act as if
she is not there at all, perhaps thinking that if they ignore her
she will vanish and with her this house, these three days, the
newly turned earth in the far field. "Well, they are wrong. None of
it will disappear. We'll live with it, tiptoe around it, make
excuses and blame each other. And who is to blame? Tom, for coming
here to homestead at the foot of the red rock mountains? For
begetting children upon my body? Sons to inherit, daughters to
marry? Or I, in my -- not innocence, that's not the word I want --
my cocoon, my shroud of womanhood that brought me here, a continent
away from home to wifehood, motherhood, acceptance of death as a
part of life? Birth and death are what I see and take for granted.
Life comes and goes with the seasons, with the years. There is a
violence in this soil, in the people who labor on it. Perhaps it is
only the truth of the earth, and one accepts it or goes down in
defeat."
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