Amber Necklace from Gdansk

by Foster, Linda Nemec

• ISBN13: 9780807127124
• ISBN10: 0807127124
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

Inspired by her Polish American heritage and her first visit to her family's homeland in 1996, Linda Nemec Foster's stunning new collection poignantly reflects on the immigrant experience -- an experience of loss and discovery, of ambivalence and pride, of deep tragedy and redemption. Foster's own ethnicity as the daughter of second-generation immigrants from Poland is colored by America's somewhat disinterested view of the "other" Europe -- only recently emerged from history's dark shadow -- and of a country that for a hundred years did not exist as a political entity. In the book's opening poem, "The Awkward Young Girl Approaching You", she struggles with this sense of ethnic identity: "Who will speak for the dispossessed, / those who come from nowhere, / whose birthplace cannot be found / on any map . . .?" Foster's attempts to reclaim an ethnic heritage, to search for herself in the mirror of her family's history, resonate throughout her verse.

Amber Necklace from Gdansk moves from lyric childhood memories and descriptions of immigrant life to prose poems

Table of Contents

Conjuring Up the Landscape
The Awkward Young Girl Approaching You	1	(2)
Doppelganger	3	(1)
The Therapeutist: After Magritte	4	(1)
The Immigrant's Dream	5	(1)
My Name	6	(1)
Young Boy in a Tenement House, Holding the Moon	7	(1)
Portrait of My Father, Learning to Count	8	(2)
The Immigrant Children at Union School	10	(1)
The Old Neighborhood	11	(2)
The Silent One	13	(1)
Ritual	14	(2)
The Tree That Almost Died	16	(2)
The Countries That Claim Me	18	(1)
Sitting in America at the End of the Century	19	(2)
The Rivers of Past and Present
The Two Rivers in My Story	21	(1)
The Woman with the Two Rivers Growing from Her Hair	22	(2)
Mengele's Butterflies	24	(1)
Layover in Frankfurt	25	(2)
Homecoming	27	(2)
Dark Amber of Regret
Mazovian Willows	29	(2)
In My Grandmother's House	31	(2)
The Rain Leaving Its Breath on the Grass	33	(1)
Mother Embracing Her Daughter in a Garden of Sunflowers	34	(1)
The Rain in Bielsko	35	(1)
Letter from the Last Place on Earth	36	(1)
Huge Oak Filling the Sky	37	(1)
After the War: Purple Flowers Spilling from the Windows	38	(1)
Songs of Sorrow	39	(1)
Chapel with Skulls	40	(1)
Moje Rozwiane Wlosy	41