Gloss

By Ida Stewart

Review for her circle ezine 

There is an expression that you are the place you come from. This is especially true of Ida Stewart and her poignant outpourings of home, heart and homily, as collected in her first book of poetry, Gloss.

It is also true that you are the way in which you say it.

Gloss is a Greek word for “tongue” or “language.” Reading Gloss we understand a woman honing a new way of saying what she means and comprehends.

Stewart is from West Virginia, home of the Appalachian Mountains, and the mountaintop is a real presence, punctuating the collection with a recurring appearance:

The mountaintop solemnly
The mountaintop as expression or choking on her own words
The mountaintop as a magician falling for her own trick
The mountaintop unmoored
The mountaintop sends a postcard from The Breaks Interstate Park
The mountaintop as is

The mountaintop is mother, activist, counselor, adjuring Stewart to “find her center,” her voice, her alphabet. Her alphabet includes a series of “glossary” poems, in which Stewart explores root words, root causes, building a new kind of vocabulary to discuss her longing homesickness. The mountaintop is under siege, and Stewart defends it with words, with language, with a singsong celebration of all that it is.

The first poem of the collection is “Ginseng,” a wild hymn to the “forest-body, heart and mind.”

            You are real and dream and dissolute.
        I mean you are a tangle and a song.

Stewart plunges language, the vernacular of the mountain, exploring other iterations of gloss. In the title poem “Gloss,” she deals with the speaking in tongues:

          The clamor from the mouth – as in glossolalia –
           words untrapped and tumbling: the spirit
           into and out of the body from the margins.

 In “Bless Out,” gloss is annotation, words in the margin.

           The trouble is finding language that tells the truth.
           The margins are wide here, and steep;

In West Virginia it rains so hard the ground can feel like it’s literally falling away. In Gloss, Stewart chronicles the slippery washout, the loss, with a breathtaking propulsion of poetic expression. Perhaps she leaves home. Perhaps she leaves a relationship. Perhaps the mountaintop developers win. Perhaps the wild leaves her. Just a little.

But she knows where she comes from, the song of it:

            I need you like/I need another vowel in my head another/hope in this hope-heap             of hope upon hope/that becomes me my knoll my knoll-edge/my backbone my             hymn-knell to this earth.