Miracles of Sainted Earth - Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, 1 Author:Victoria Edwards Tester Victoria Edwards Tester speaks as a woman who knows what it feels like to be censored and who defiantly resists self-censorship. Tester's poems listen to the past and to creatures, land, and ghosts who most people can't hear at all. Her poems are rooted in New Mexico history but they transcend regional boundaries. Her work in an attentive inte... more »rmingling of imagination and intuition, weaving together landscape, choice, accident, love and tragedy. It was after I saw the saints behind their iron grilles
and even the children weaving their tiny crosses
torn from the laughter of winter
jasmine into the saints' cages,
that I decided to leave my prison of grief.
When I opened my mouth an exquisite white spider
crawled into the world on her eight legs.
--from "Chimayo" In his introduction to Miracles of Sainted Earth, the inaugural volume for the University of New Mexico Press's Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, Series Editor V. B. Price writes of poet Victoria Edwards Tester: "I find her work so emotionally compelling because she belongs to a community of poets heard more as voices from catacombs, tramp steamers, and long marches than as voices of orthodoxy, either tenured or coolly marginal. Latin America, occupied Celtic Europe, Welsh-Irish America, Apache and Comanche territory she speaks from those long views and sorrows more than others I can think of the poems in this volume are free of predictability and marks of rehearsal, free of critical templates, liberated by attachments to real places almost nobody knows, and by a vatic intermingling of imagination and intuition the poems in this collection listen to the past and to creatures, land, and ghosts who most people cant hear at all she links her present life, the lives of her ancestors, the world beyond human nature, and the spirit of history and its unfolding in biography, with her spiritual love of the finite. The aesthetic excitement of her poems demonstrates as vividly as possible what we all know as a matter of common sense, but dont really pay deep attention to that what happens in the present is a result of countless chances, choices, mishaps, aberrations, mysteries and tragedies of other lives interacting with landscape, climate, and historical predicament."« less