Jane Curran’s Indiana Girl, a memoir in verse, celebrates a farm
family and their land. Curran’s heart tells the stories of parents
and grandparents. Her soul describes the world of her youth,
“derelict cornstalks silvered in frost,” “the sun a red rim, a fox’s
full moon shadow etched on old snow.” “The North Field”
demonstrates how deeply the farm occupies Curran’s being.
Anne Waters Green, poet and author of The Season Lengthens
What Curran calls her “inner landscape” welcomes the reader of
Indiana Girl. This new collection of poems offers both moments and
threads that ask the reader to pause and enjoy a scene or reflect on
echoes from surrounding poems. As Curran says, “facts alone can’t
carry the story.” The voice of these poems invites us to trust and, in
that trust, to share the world of her “life’s geography.” Curran joins
many other Midwestern writers who seek to define the core of their
personal peace through a language that allows them to go home.
A. Carl Bredahl, Emeritus Professor, University of FloridaA.
Carl Bredahl, Emeritus Professor, University of Florida
Through memory, Curran explores her sense of home, its inner
landscape, shaped by family, time and the geography of an Indiana
farm. There is history here. Lineage. Memories of a life long abandoned
and reclaimed through this collection of poems. Whispers
of Frost lie buried in her words, and Dickey’s bold voice as well.
Bob Mustin, novelist, poet, editor, publisher
Jane Curran’s crisp, understated portraits of people and place
explore Wolfe’s familiar maxim —“You can’t go home again.”
But how often by circumstance we are forced to try. After her
father’s death and her mother’s oncoming dementia, Curran seeks
a re-connection to homeplace, but as her moving poems in Indiana
Girl show, it is a yearning that mere nostalgia can’t satisfy.
Settling in with her familial and literary namesakes, Curran shares
scenes of intimate reflection and nearly-forgotten tragedy, rendered
with inventive precision: “starlight, sharp as a butcher’s
blade, cuts clean edges of shadow and ice.” While these fine poems
acknowledge the inevitable changes in interior and exterior
landscapes — “I know stories of wandering without an arrival”—
Curran appreciates that “life, known and settled, would go on.”
Kenneth Chamlee, Professor Emeritus of English, Brevard
College, author of Absolute Faith and Logic of the Lost
With finely tuned sensitivity to language and the feelings of
the people she writes about, Curran conveys love for her Indiana
home along with other realms of human experience.
Richard Graham Professor Emeritus, Franklin College of
Indiana.
Indiana Girl is a love song to goodness and the ground from
which Curran sprang. The book offers a haunting remembrance
of home – a place and a past where readers can hear
and smell corn, stroll past Angus cows, recall the horrors of
World War II and Vietnam. Filled with vivid detail and epic
in scope, the poems honor one’s place on the planet until,
as the poet writes, “the hawk and the land and I were one.”
Especially vivid are the “Histories,” snapshots of people with
whom Curran grew up. The collection’s lyrical language, sweep of
time, and tussle with loss make Indiana Girl rich and unforgettable.
Karen Luke Jackson, Ed.D., writer, spiritual companion, and
Courage & Renewal® retreat leader
