Martha Serpas - Böcker

An evocative meditation on destruction and creation, the sacred and ephemeral, along Louisiana's coast. In poems that bear witness to the eroding bayou country and its Cajun culture, Martha Serpas venerates a vanishing landscape defined by water—sensuous, fecund, and destructive. As marsh turns into gulf, identity and consciousness are transformed as well. Serpas's verses invest paradox with her own defiantly spiritual meaning.

The Diener investigates loss and healing, change and permanence, in a hospital trauma center and the eroding landscape of southern Louisiana. The diener himself, the morgue attendant who assists the dead in the interstice between the living world and the world beyond, is the person with whom Martha Serpas most identifies in this collection. As a part-time hospital chaplain, Serpas possesses keen insight into the despair and resolve of patients and their families and friends. Yet the themes in The Diener go well beyond grief and loss, as Serpas finds deeper meaning in faith, humanity, and the celebration of life. The diener is preeminent in a cast of characters-a sailor, a clerk, roustabouts, mothers, nurses, and chaplains-that represents the paradoxes of body and soul. Loss is never just absence, and presence is not necessarily wholeness. Attending to the pastoral both as ecological advocacy and spiritual care, The Diener looks to the metaphysical world and the Gulf landscape as vehicles of change and stasis.

Martha Serpas's Double Effect reimagines Saint Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of that name, which governs whether an action is morally permissible despite a foreseeable evil result. In lush verse pointed by Cajun language, these poems measure the good that can result from destructive situations, encompassing ecological devastation, maternal deprivation, spiritual poverty, and mania. Time in this collection is kept by the feast days, hurricanes, celebrations, accidents, and rescues along southern Louisiana's disappearing bayous and eroding coasts. In the end, the question remains: Is there a good that can redeem suffering and loss?

This collection of poetry deliberately and beautifully weds the secular to the divine in poems which, steeped in the Cajun landscape of Serpas's Louisiana, prickle with exhilarating sensuality. Through its votive offerings to a God who is all too aware of the longings and aspirations of humankind, 'Coc;te Blanche' becomes testament to a new personal belief that is simple yet breathtaking in its reach.