It was a chance reading of an article on poetry that led me to Catharine Savage Brosman. That, and a reference in the article to her having taught for 35 years at Tulane University. I found other poems of hers online, and I became so interested in my fellow New Orleanian that I ordered one, and ultimately three of her later collections.
What I found was an inquisitive mind, ranging over subjects as diverse as flowers, theEmpress Eugenie’sflight from Paris in 1870, a New Orleans wine bar, False River in Louisiana’s Point Coupee Parish (part of the old Mississippi cut off when the river changed course), Antarctica, postmodernism (she’s not a fan), and the landscape and geography of western Colorado.
And travel. A considerable number of the poems in these three later collections are about travel; almost all of her most recent collection, A Memory of Manaus, is about travel. And not only travel, but travel with and about people. Her remarriage to her first husband Patric Savage created significant changes in her life – a move to Houston and a joint decision to travel were only two. (Savage died in 2017 at the age of 88; I learned that he was born in St. Louis, where I now live, and he worked for most of his career at the same company I worked for in Houston.)
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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