Ecologies of Southern Lands
Reflections on Red Clay Suite 

"I cried when I moved out here/and saw trees so short and few,/the prairie altogether flat, and earth near scarlet like my Georgia/earth but that's where kinship ended./Andthen, the land started hurting me/like an amputated part of my body." (66)

The sense of the author's strong connection to the land of her present and past and of her ancestors is tangible.  That she feels the earth hurting her like am amputated part of her body.  That the land holds so much and is related to her sense of grief, of her loss, of her familial history recent and deep in the recesses of her lineage.  So many lines cut deep relating to the land:

"bits of home on my tongue and I give praise.    56
I take the land as text as a preacher might           7
if the earth is denied me, then what do I know? 24
to lay me down beside the truth of this land"       54

And also there is the strong sense of nostalgia for the land she has called home.  This book holds me in a similar place, and i drink the imagery down with so many memories. The land and the food take me there, the cobbler and neckbones and greens and fried fish on a meatless Friday and fried chicken and peaches and names familiar like Flat Rock Primitive Baptist and the red clay for miles.  looking out the window to weathered tobacco barns and sitting on the porch and listening to thunderstorms on my mom's porch, I can feel it when I read this book and close my eyes, feel the sticky of the red clay soil.  And this book brings me to my father too.  In a different way and yet there he is.  The argument we were in when i woke to the call of the news that he was dead and and the sound of the wind chimes out back behind the apartment where he would sit staring out, smoking cigarettes and drinking in his anger and solitude. And the reconciling that goes on looking at photographs of him with eyes younger then mine, seeing him as a little boy and seeing an innocence, seeing his light above my memories of his heavy burdened brow, yellow stained teeth, and sense of a life unfulfilled. 
"That dying is such a brisk business./ This is the weight of what grief is." (63)
How we carry in our body the land, topography of our memories, and of our sorrows. How we carry in our body the memories of our bodies and of our ancestors.
And too how land is learned and sewn and tilled and comes back to sustain us, and how we learn or are not taught how to work the land to feel her nurture us. How that knowledge comes to us or is broken by the histories of too much dissonance and too much disconnect and too much sorrow. 
How she could have grown corn/so tall, she said, if only she had the land./...How she finally taught me, insistent./How a last meal must be clean.