House of the Mother

By Susan Bright
Austin Book Award, 1994

This is a gathering of poetry and antique photographs in search of the healing power of the mother. It takes a hard look at the enormous world consequence of diminishing her life force, which is the healing and nurturing part of humanity. There are poems from Bright's work as an educator and poems that strip bare institutionalized child abuse. There are poems about the Heartland, America, in the '50s and '60s and poems about how the Mothers hold our lives together with love, creating relationship--the thread of life.

"Susan digs down to the dirt to make you see the dark realities of womankind's struggles from pre-civilization to present day, which I call The Destructive Era. Images she fills us with: raising our children in a violent world; the storms of the raging Earth Mother; keeping track of our planetary brothers and the newest forms of their ideology; women's rights or shall I say lack of them; how what was happening 100 years ago was woven with misery, (for misery is always our shadow), the timelessness of racism . . This book is not to be missed and I sincerely mean it."

Denise Fleischer, "Gotta Write"

Antique photographs, many by James Dwight Safford, the poet's maternal grandfather. 136 pgs, $14.95, ISBN: 0-911051-79-1.