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Critical Praise for One-Legged Dancer

• One-Legged Dancer is a book that deserves cover-to-cover reading: the poems lean together so well, truly a book of a unified sensibility. I loved it, felt myself taken in more and more as I progressed. They are poems of rich awareness, rooted in the body, generous in their embrace of the world, neither denying the self in that world but always ready to love the NOT-ME. Even with the many first-person accountings, not once did I feel a verging toward solopsism. Instead, I always felt an honest engagement, one of accepting oneself in the environment rather than celebrating oneself at the world's expense. When I look back for poems that were special highlights for me, I find myself rereading ones like "Adobadora," which are so much of the body, so particular of felt experience, that my male sensibility joins you in your human experience. It's a wonderful book, just wonderful.

  — Prof. Jim Heynen, St. Olaf's College, Minnesota

Reviews

• Rich, Vibrant Poems Invite Reader into a World of Color and Motion

  The Winston Salem JounalApril 27, 2003

  Reviewed by Kathryn Milam

  Poetry is not a static art. Though the poet confines her words to the page, in the readers' hands, they are transformed into living creatures who breathe and change according to circumstance and experience. With each reading, poems flourish with more and more possibility. They turn back on themselves, retrack their steps, take unexpected paths and explore new themes.

  Such are the poems of Pamela Uschuk in her newest collection, One-Legged Dancer. Uschuk allows space for us as readers to discover the sources and the impetus for her work. Her language opens the door into her world, where we may discover bits and pieces of our own lives.

  Set predominantly in the American Southwest and Mexico, Uschuk's poems evoke the mystery and dynamics of the desert, the rain forest and the sea. Her landscapes are at times ethereal and lush, filled with images of wild and exuberant growth. In "Sueos y amor," the luxury of nature reflects the hope of new love:

  I am dreaming of love again and calla lilies trumpet into the cloud 
  forest opening to rain that fills their bells with its own fearless music ....
  I am dreaming of love again and the red hibiscus unfolds its skirts
  in a folklorico that flings the galactic pollen of the heart wide.

  "Baptismal," an especially sensual poem, recalls an evening when two couples are reborn through an experience that at once celebrates the physical body while acknowledging the underlying presence of its mortality. A midnight frolic in the sea becomes a sacrament and a consecration of life and death:

  None of us can explain our toes, ankles, 
  calves, thighs slathered by tiny green galaxies. 
  Wherever waves touch us, we seem to ignite ... 
  This is the mystery we've waited for 
  all of our lives, the vision we can't explain 
  except to say one night we got lucky 
  to swim through the stars 
  despite death glittering beneath the waves.

  Uschuk's ear for language is not limited to descriptions of nature's beauty and its corresponding reflections of our inner lives. In "El Cristo del Cicln," she recounts the horror of a storm, its aftermath and its implications in a larger world view. In 1971, Hurricane Lily ravaged the coastal town of Barra De Navidad, Mexico. The townspeople crowded into the local church, begging Christ to save them. The winds increased, however, until a young girl came into the church and fell to her knees. At that moment, the winds stopped and the waters drained back into the sea.

  Observing the worshipers in the church many years later, the speaker asks, "What do they pray for?" She recalls her nephews back home in school:

  ... learning the rhetoric of evil 
  depends on the proper conjugation 
  of the verb "to hate" with the noun "enemy." 
  Counting history's multiplication tables of revenge, who 
  will teach that war, no matter how good the cause, is 
  still only the dumb division of prime numbers? 
  I light candles for all those I love, 
  wondering what petition could ever turn 
  that cyclone of righteous vengeance 
  from terrorizing what would be 
  the peaceful shores of our lives.

  In light of the war in Iraq, "El Cristo del Cicln" speaks directly to us as we consider our awful alternatives - vengeance or peace, evil or good. We enter the tiny, ragged church with the poet and listen to what the Christ of the Cyclone has to tell us based on this time and this experience. We wonder how to pray in the face of this terrible storm.

  Perhaps the most arresting piece in Uschuk's collection is the title poem, "One-Legged Dancer." The poet watches a Sunday procession in the city of Guanajuato, Mexico. A parade of Aztecs, dressed in feathers, bracelets and beads dance; "their muscles sweat to the drum's holy spirit." The scene is electrifying, a swirl of music, motion and color. But in the midst of the crowd, one dancer dominates. He is the one-legged man, supported by a crutch, who dips and sways beside a beautiful woman:

  Sacred with passion 
  their feet clap the rhythm 
  as they dance side by side 
  surviving the labyrinth of streets 
  dug by Conquistadors 
  who razed shining cities, 
  burned parrots and divine eagles alive in aviaries 
  but could not singe 
  what flies in these dancer's eyes.

  How often have we been this one-legged dancer, handicapped in our attempts to live our lives with grace and beauty, yet propelled by an ember of desire? We feel and empathize with the passion of the dancers in the sacred and holy act of survival.

  I cannot speak of this book without mentioning the photo emulsion prints by Lynn Watt scattered throughout its pages. Their sepia tones are a perfect accompaniment to the brilliance of Uschuk's images and a restful pause between each group of poems.

  Pamela Uschuk is the director of the Salem College Center for Women Writers. Her gift to us is a volume of poems that begs us to lift them off the page into new life. She has trusted us to take her work and follow it where our own experience leads us. Winston-Salem, and the world of poetry, is lucky to have her.

  Kathryn Milam is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.

• Rain TaxiFall 2003

  Readers who know the "sensual garden" of Pamela Uschuk's earlier poems will delight in both the familiar and unfamiliar in this new collection. One-Legged Dancer delivers the same homegrown sensuality, but in this collection the personal quest holds thematic dominance. The journey is through Mexico, with its scars and wounds of unrest and war; in a land where violence always lurks ("the same bullet firing all over the world"), the narrator pauses to observe, lament, and pay homage to the scenery and people. From the drama of a train crash to the tender hands of a street artist, the poems suggest that without pain, celebrations would have less meaning.

  Many of the poems can be read as poems of witness, exposing the oppressors and showing reverence for the survivors. Ushuk can narrate grizzly happenings, but her eye is as compassionate as it is exact. Place poems will never be the same; her sensibility not only honors the natural world, but ignites it. And in the title poem she writes what might be seen as the touchstone passage to the entire collection:

  But it is the one-legged danceer
  hopping and leaning on his crutch
  wrapped with electric blue tape
  I would follow
  through this world.

  This is a book that deserves cover-to-cover reading: the poems lean together so well, truy the work of a unified sensibility.