Becoming an Ancestor

Book excerpt: Poetry. "BECOMING AN ANCESTOR carries us from the very beginning of this great clock-universe through human migrations to the bitter end, where however a horned lark is singing beside a field of silver hairgrass in winter. When this confluence produces Lucille Lang Day, who sings the world as both a family member and a scientist, and her daughters and grandchildren, they appear in the life-lines of her poems both as the homecoming of historical pilgrimages and as intertwining swirls of DNA. Here too the endings can be bitter as family members slip away. But the music of her poetry remains."--Emily Grosholz "The poems in BECOMING AN ANCESTOR begin in autobiography, move into history, and branch backward and forward through genealogy, offering instruction on the natural world along the way. Lucille Lang Day recreates her ancestors with scrupulous detail and often stunning images until her poems read like the history of anyone 'born of the myths of Europe/and North America.' These myths propel Day to tell us of migrations, mutations, secrets, heartbreak, disappointments, defiance, death, and resilience--in other words, of life in all its complexity as she shows us all 'which way is home' in our shared fate of becoming ancestors."--Lynne Knight "Soulfully thrilling, the poems in BECOMING AN ANCESTOR constitute--historically, geographically, emotionally, caringly--a mindful poet's family picture album. Following centuries of fateful migrations, Lucille Lang Day becomes the California teller of tales that wow us with her own intimate versions of how need, time and again, restores our lives to living streams of love."--Al Young "At the poetic heart of Lucille Lang Day's BECOMING AN ANCESTOR is a series of vivid historical poems starting in the early 1600s when 13-year-old Elizabeth sails to Plymouth on the Mayflower. Rowland is in the Gold Rush, Nathan in the Union Army. Old maid Angenette has an out-of-wedlock baby with a Wampanoag Indian. The ancestors tell Day, 'Welcome home. The elders have been waiting for you./Listen to their drums, the beat/of your own heart.' As the poet comes closer to BECOMING AN ANCESTOR herself, she details her losses and her fears, and she worries whether she is creating a masterpiece or an old pot. Read this old pot, and you will find the hand of a master."--Penelope Scambly Schott