Description: Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and a member of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her small book, To Frighten a Storm, from Copper Canyon Press, won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. These are poems from a mature and wise consciousness that understands loss, grief, and the value of the unassailable "solaces we yearn for." One emerges from Cardiff's intense, complex meditations with a renewed sense of both the durability of the human spirit and its potential.
Review Quotes: "[Gladys Cardiff] is often grasped by something seen - a Victorian postcard picture of a stereotyped Indian woman, luna moths, Giacometti's changing use of space, two flocks of crows, a single crow; but also by situations - the final days of a couple's pet shop, a recording of a fatal airplane crash, an elder's courteous speech about repatriation, and someone else's need. Usually a poem has a comfortable length of line for its purpose, unfolds, and becomes complete (there is also a pantoum). One feels in the presence of eyes that see much, of maturity not easily won."-- "The Virginia Quarterly Review"