The Soul's Habitation by Gretchen Souza
Praise for The Soul's Habitation:
"These are shimmering poems, full of motion and luminous life. Gretchen Sousa dares to dive deeply into self and memory, and emerges with surprising and evocative images. Her gaze is wide and unflinching as she sings our riches and losses in this broken world. These poems of ripe awareness are gifts that reinforce one's faith in the power of poetry to evoke the mystery and hope of our existence."
-Jean Janzen, poet,
author of Piano in the Vineyard
"What a pleasure it is to read a poet who knows how to transform the fullness of life and the grit of experience into liquid silver, into lyrical voice. In Gretchen Sousa's poems, the past keeps company with the present, deepens it. When she offers the reader 'the soft bones of her creations,' she offers both sustenance and beauty."
-Susan Lazzaro, poet,
author of The Flesh Envelope
"Gretchen Sousa probes every corner of the imagination and pulls up images and feelings for us to hold in cupped hands. Old lives, losses, delicious recollections of being in life fully, bungled moments, poignant yearnings, compassion, incompleteness, wholeness. She knits heaven to earth for us and we don't even notice the seams."
-Gertrude Mueller Nelson,
author of To Dance With God
"Using stories of spiritual transcendence, artfully constructed snapshots of the natural world and, most of all, insights about the lives of those she has touched, Gretchen Sousa takes us to familiar grounds of the human soul. This book is emotion filled reading for both fellow poet and the uninitiated reader searching for accessible poetic accounts of the human condition."
-Chris Hayward, MD
Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry
Stanford Univ. Medical Center
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Gretchen Hayward Sousa lives in Southern California, where she grew up. She graduated from Occidental College and began writing poetry intentionally after Norman Corwin, of radio fame, read some of her poems aloud to the Creative Writing Class at Idyllwild, California. He then pronounced her a "poet."
Since then Sousa has received top awards from American Pen Women
and the San Diego Christian Writers' Guild. Her work has been published
in Sojourners, Mars Hill, Christianity and the Arts and many other
literary journals. She has studied with Mark Strand and Robert Peters.
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excerpts
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Building the Soul's Habitation
After the sun slips away,
light remains, transformed,
pink and orange
igniting the dark lake,
the wings of geese
as they settle into night.
After the sun,
the grand swoop of stars
across sky. Sweetgrass,
night-blooming jasmine,
mingle with faint odors
of skunk, fresh dung.
After the stars-moon,
white root burrowing deep
into sky's black expanse,
ravenous mouth sucking
the waves from shore,
our bodies from our bones.
After the moon fades
into dawn, we gather images
the way itinerant bees
collect pollen, creating
connections as they move
from bloom to bloom.
Everything related.
With metaphor and imagination,
we write the story of our lives,
building the soul's habitation
as our bodies loose their hold.
After the gathering, the letting go.
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The Erotic Pleasures of Poetry
When a woman writes,
desire is a trembling undercurrent,
her passion lusting for words.
She gazes at her life
long and languorously
the way her hands
contemplate her body,
moist and naked in the mirror.
She tastes phrases that revel
on her tongue, ring her body
like a swinging bell.
She prowls across the page,
lynx-eyed, into the night,
lured by the musk-scent of memories-
a trail into the interior,
lush and pulsing.
A woman will walk into currents
that surge across coral reefs,
opening herself the way sea anemones
unfold to nourishing swells.
Spellbound by metaphor,
she descends into the depths-
blood rushing, shudders
in the arms of her deepest self.
The soft bones of her creations
wash up on the shore,
formed by the ecstasy
at their conception-pleasures
that carry imagination to blue grottos,
where images swim
like luminous fish
she captures in her hands.
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