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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-57131-434-5
Pages: 88
Publish Date: Dec, 2010
Genre: Poetry
Seedlip and Sweet Apple
BY Arra Lynn Ross
Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual world, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary, Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America, in poems inspired by extensive historical research and manifested in astonishingly original verse. Merging the mythical with the mystical with the real, Arra Lynn Ross’s poems are linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate in the female form. Ann Lee taught a spiritual path of harmony and joy, which included ecstatic dance and song, simplicity, communal living, and celibacy. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms—including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems—Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living—and to live in working—that promises simplicity, peace, and joy.
"A creative and compelling rendering of a strange and charismatic leader. Ross's poems catch the dangers and the challenges of this woman who heard God's whisperings, lost four children to early deaths, journeyed to the New World in 1744, used her body with others to warm a room with dance, and rejoiced in the sight of a deer or the pleasures of watching rosehip tea steaming in the sun."
—Spirituality & Practice
"Ross’s powerful collection inevitably recalls Robert Peters’s The Gift to Be Simple (1975) and she is no less penetrating of Mother Ann’s psyche. But whereas Peters’s stubby-lined, intense, physical style kindled fire, Ross’s longer lines, occasional prose poems and narrative episodes, documentary interjections, and employment of voices other than Ann’s feel broader, cooler, more rested in the Lord, at last."
—Booklist
"A work powerful in voice and craft. . . . If you care about the value of our national literature, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is well worth the investment."
—Feminist Review
"Situated between glossary and glossolalia, word and vision, the communal act of language and the singularity of inspiration, Seedlip and Sweet Apple reaffirms the tradition of American visionaries, even while reshaping that tradition into an innovative and dynamic lyric. Arra Lynn Ross raises the roof with her convocation of tongues. A pioneering collection of poems.”
—D. A. Powell, author of Chronic
