This Strange Land

Starred review from February 15, 2011

McCallum, an Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner for The Water Between Us, begins her third volume with lines, images, and music that reflect an amalgam of memory, desire, and loss. Born in Jamaica, McCallum, like her narrator, moved to the United States with her grandmother, leaving behind her own mother (and a suicidal father) to political unrest in a country that has hosted violence and boasted Bob Marley. These are poems of ruin and rebirth, of the joys and damage a mother knows: "Rock and stone// are different words which mean the same when flung;/ beauty delivers its own kind of wound." Lovely to read, McCallum's poetry is constructed partly of proper Queen's English and partly of Jamaican patois, and their blending effectively translates the narrator's quest to save history, to refuse to let it repeat itself, to define and redefine motherhood and who she is. "Where are you, mother, / now the spell is broken?// ~ Daughter, I am the dark in your eye." VERDICT This is a marvelous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended.--Karla Huston, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Madison

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