Trace

February 25, 2013
Pankey’s ninth collection follows the poet into the hushed “gray dawn” of depression as he searches, often in vain, for God, and for faith in nature and himself. Pankey is compelled by the way this longing for the divine can be present and absent within the same hour, how poems where “antlers hold open the sky” can just as soon lead to a weary married couple who are “so tired of watching the war on TV:/ The same body dragged through the street,/ Snagged for a moment in a pothole.” While certain of his handlings of perfunctory sex, cloud watching, and hangovers might make for poems that feel equally passionless, loafing, and achy, it’s hard to deny the conflict that Pankey explores honestly and powerfully in these new poems. Poetry, God, nature—none of these things provide lasting solace, if they provide any at all: “One reads until each page is blank,/ keeps reading,/ As if the truth of scripture will be revealed.” Where Pankey goes looking for the heavens he most often finds his own body, or a trace of a myth in nature that helps him challenge the old stories. “No gods offered us fire,” he writes in “Cold Mountain Mediations”—“A burning branch/ fell from a tree and we dragged it back home.”

July 1, 2015
Savoy (environmental studies, geology, Mt. Holyoke Coll.; "The Colors of Nature") successfully leads readers on an illuminating journey through history--her own and her ancestors', U.S. native and nonnative peoples', and the country's, via insights on varied American landscapes and cultural and personal narratives. The San Pedro Valley, Madeline Island on Michigan's Lake Superior, the Cimarron River, Washington, DC, and more backdrop chapters addressing historic themes such as racism and slavery, migration and displacement, societal and geographical transitions, etc. The author challenges readers to consider ethical, social, and environmental issues such as broken tribal agreements, the impact and meaning of changed geographical names, and the "human costs" of displacement, loss, and labor when discussing ecological footprints. VERDICT Savoy's immersive, accessible, and evocative narrative interweaves questions of morality, social justice, and stewardship of the land we call home with discussions of history and the American landscape and will interest readers of history, social science, and earth science.--Jennifer Harris, Southern New Hampshire Univ. Lib., Manchester

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2015
An earth scientist explores the broad historical branches extending from her own roots. Many geologists limit their subjects of inquiry to the Earth, probing contours of the land to reveal how past developments have come to shape the present. In Savoy's (Environmental Studies and Geology/Mount Holyoke Coll.; co-author: The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, 2011, etc.) latest study, however, the quest of this self-described "Earth historian" begins closer to home. She traces her Native, African-, Euro-American ancestry across the United States in the hope of learning what her extended family experienced. The author's parents both served in the military during World War II, her father in the segregated Army Air Forces and her mother as a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps. Impelled by their reticence when recounting their experiences in different communities, Savoy retraces her parents' steps from Washington, D.C., to California, South Carolina, Arizona, and the Mexican borderland, searching in each destination for the muted historical realities of the marginalized. Along this trek, the author unearths unfathomable stories of racial discrimination and federally sanctioned hypocrisy]e.g., Charles Drew, the African-American physician who developed the blood bank, was fired when he tried to end the "government-approved" policy of segregating blood; African-American nurses in the ranks of the Army Nurse Corps experienced segregation when forced to serve where white nurses refused to. Savoy's well-researched account, which includes numerous lyric eyewitness descriptions of place, also delves into recently declassified National Archives records to note how prisoners of war "expressed to the nurses their surprise that Americans would fight to preserve democracy abroad and at home exhibit prejudice to other Americans solely because of their skin color." Springing from the literal Earth to metaphor, Savoy demonstrates the power of narrative to erase as easily as it reveals, yielding a provocative, eclectic expose of the palimpsest historically defining the U.S. as much as any natural or man-made boundary.

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October 15, 2015
What if written history bears no trace of our existence, our contribution to the land? What do these silences speak of and bear witness to? Savoy's illuminating treatise teases apart these questions as she traces her family's African American heritage, piecing together scant information about her ancestry from her mostly taciturn parents. As she travels around the U.S., visiting placesOklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, Washington, D.C.brushed by her family's genealogical tree, a clear commonality begins to emerge: the widely relayed picture of American history largely overlooks African American contributions to the shaping of the country. A professor of geology, Savoy also draws connections between heritage and the physical land, a crucial perspective even if these parallels are occasionally abstract and belabored. Each told fact holds meaning to the recorder, and each historical narrative (re)presents accidental and deliberate silences or omissions, Savoy writes. As she assuredly shows, these silences can be telling, reminding us to watch for bias, and that when it comes to interpreting history, the viewing lens is almost as important as the narrative.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 7, 2015
In reverential, elegiac prose, Savoy (The Colors of Nature), a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, meditates on the meaning of history and identity as related to place. Savoy’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were “free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and people indigenous to this land,” and she has “long felt estranged from time and place, uncertain of where home lies.” In trying to connect with her family’s past, she travels to Oklahoma, where she was told some ancestors may have lived. She spends a day in the Black Heritage Center archives at Langston University, learning of early African-American homesteads, and visits the rural town of Boley, Okla., founded in 1903 on land owned by Creek Indian freedwoman Abigail Barnett. Though Savoy does not unearth any concrete evidence linking her mother’s family to the area, she gains further appreciation for the lives people lived and the hardships they endured. Exploring her father’s familial ties to Washington, D.C., Savoy contrasts the slavery-oriented history of that “invented place” with the enthusiastically mixed crowd she saw during the 2009 inauguration of President Obama. Savoy’s deep knowledge of the land opens up intriguing new avenues for exploring the multifaceted, tumultuous nature of American identity.