Rooms: New and Selected Poems (Earthworks)

"Rooms" is a collection of new and selected poems by Diane Glancy. The rooms are spaces from previous collections - spaces influenced by memory and the pull of the past on the present. This collection of poems walks a line between balance and imbalance and struggles for an alignment of fragmented experiences. It tries to put into perspective the disparities of survival. It seeks to reconcile history and a broken heritage that results from a collision of cultures. These poems, written from 1986-2004, include work from earlier collections, "The Relief Of America", "The Shadow's Horse", "Stones For A Pillow", "(Ado)Ration", "Boom Town", "Lone Dog's Winter Count", "Iron Woman", "One Age In A Dream", "Offering", and a chapbook, "Coyote's Quodlibet". The title is taken from an idea, The Ames Room, which was a demonstration created by Dartmouth Professor Adelbert Ames in the 1940's to show that we can look into an off-sided room, yet it will appear in proportion because the way we think something should be shapes our perception of it. If the mind is a trickster shaping the misshapen into a familiar form and setting upright what has been turned on its side, what does a lopsided perception do? Does it skew what is not skewed? What if history, in this case, Native American history, has been turned on its side? How does the off-sided perception of the vanquished warp normal experience? "Rooms" is a calling together of the tribes. These poems are a campground of voices in council.