Introduction to Florence McGinn's BLOOD TRAIL
by Victor di Suvero

The cross-cultural currents that have enriched American writing in the latter part of the 20th century continue to be part of the literary scene today. From Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club to the rich variety of Maya Angelou's African American sensibility, the reading public has had the opportunity to experience feelings and conditions more varied than at any other time in American literary life.

Florence McGinn's work continues that cross-cultural adventure. Her poetry, crafted with care for the detail of her Chinese heritage, reaches into our consciousness with current American scenes and with language that touches our hearts.

The shorter personal poems in the series entitled "Moments" evoke the ideograms of Chinese writing. Thoughts and feelings are juxtaposed with an economy of language that evokes the reader in ways that more detailed, expanded verse will not. Grounded in the tradition of Japanese haiku, these short poems are kin also to the early Tang poems of McGinn's heritage.

As a Chinese-American married to an Irish-American scientist and living and teaching in American public schools where her grace, care, and talent have been recognized nationally, Florence McGinn's sensibilities as expressed in her poems about family life, about relationships, about parenting are all infused with the variety of her cultural heritage combined with the American challenges she faces in today's world.

Her grandmother, dying, remembers "the drifting dust of a Canton village street waiting to turn to thick, sucking mud when summer skies flowed over" in a poem that ends "with farewells, but pregnant with clear birthing waters." It is this sort of juxtaposition that is continuously used to create the tension that makes the poems in Blood Trail sing.

It would be easy to say that the subjects of so many of the poems are universal and the feelings expressed could belong to any one culture or another. However, just as with the culinary arts, the art of poetry is grounded in the cultural experience of the poet as well as that of the poet's audience. Here, we have a rare example of specific cultural and historical references that are Chinese worked into the current American idiom so skillfully that the reader is taken to that place of recognition which transcends origins and consequently makes the experience of the poem his or her own.

It has been said that love and poetry are the only two countries where, when visited, the rest of the world disappears. McGinn's poems are of that kind. The involvement of the person reading them excludes all other sensibilities, and the reader's involvement is total.

In her poem "Speaking the Language," she summarizes her experience in becoming proficient in a language other than the one she was born into. Her clarity transports the reader. All the spoken and unspoken feelings about learning English, her family's involvement in her learning process, all result in an understanding of the bridges one crosses when one's language changes or is changed.

The poems in this collection can be defined as singular contributions to and evidence of the American dream working. With dedication, grace, and persistence, a voice speaks truths, reaffirming that the human condition is one that we all share, that making love and celebrating it is an appropriate function for us all, that working from one set of values to another can be a process of enrichment rather than denial, and that a worthwhile future can be shaped out of a difficult past.

Florence McGinn is not afraid to tackle difficult issues in her work and in her personal life. The evidence is in the poems themselves, growing up, becoming a woman, loving and parenting. Looking both to her past as daughter and to her present as mother, she takes us through the changing qualities of a life lived fully and responsibly and shares her experiences with practical and caring grace.

Probing the human spirit as it searches for ultimate clarity under the descending petals of a blooming cherry blossom tree can be felt as part of the enlightenment of BLOOD TRAIL's seductive journey into the senses of an Asian-American poet.

Florence McGinn's poetry shapes the core of human vitality. She paints with the ease of Chinese brush strokes to place the archetypes and lush metaphors of human existence into her reader's hearts. The poetry goes beyond the definition of mere words written in meter and syntax to become part of the organic orchestra of human desires. Perhaps, Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese poet puts it best.

Basho's description of the riddles and mysteries of existence is reawakened through the creative genius and boldness of Florence McGinn's writing. Her poems illuminate the hidden core of all races and lifestyles as she turns to Chinese myths, history, multiculturalism, family stories, and dreams with a powerful, magnetically readable, and original voice. Her poems unearth the fragility of nature, the death of a parent, and the connection between memory and everyday life. These natural changes are depicted with an exotic and sublime play of words as each section in the anthology wraps its poetic tendrils around the reader's intellect.

The start of a poetic feast, Sources bleeds with poems in relation to the loss of childhood in a multi-cultural home, while Moments and Tracks honor the courageous journey of a women from adolescence to motherhood. Living Trail is a spiritual mosaic forming the realizations of adulthood and the reformation of mind and soul.

This book is a great resource of phenomenal poetry as well as a path leading to an awakening of spiritual connectivity with the universality of revered ancestry and the human cycles of life.

Copyright © 2004 Insynthesis. All Rights Reserved.