Collins, Martha 1940-

views updated

Collins, Martha 1940-

PERSONAL:

Born November 25, 1940, in Omaha, NE; daughter of William E. and Katheryn E. Collins; married Theodore M. Space, April, 1991. Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1962; University of Iowa, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Poet, translator, writer, editor, and educator. Northeast Missouri State College, Kirksville, assistant professor, 1965-66; University of Massachusetts, Boston, from instructor to professor of English, 1966-2002, codirector of creative writing, 1979-2000; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and codirector of creative writing, 1997-2007.

MEMBER:

Poetry Society of America, Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Bunting Institute fellow, 1982-83; Pushcart Prize, 1985, 1996, 1998; Ingram Merrill Foundation, fellow, 1988; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1990; Di Castagnola award, 1990; Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition, c. 1991, for The Arrangement of Space; ALTA award, for The Women Carry River Water, 1998; Witter Bynner/Santa Fe Art Institute grantee, 2001; Lannan Foundation residency grantee, 2003; Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, 2005, for selections from Blue Front; Anisfield-Wolf award, Cleveland Foundation, 2006, and Ohioana Book Award, 2007, both for Blue Front.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Critical Essays on Louise Bogan, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1984.

The Catastrophe of Rainbows (poetry), Cleveland State University Poetry Center (Cleveland, OH), 1985, 2nd edition, 1998.

The Arrangement of Space (poetry), G. Smith Publisher (Salt Lake City, UT), 1991.

A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet: Poems, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1993.

(Editor and translator, with Nguyen Quang Thieu) Nguyen Quang Thieu, The Women Carry River Water: Poems, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1997.

Some Things Words Can Do (poetry), Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1998.

(Translator, with Thuy Änh) Lam Thi My Da, Green Rice: Poems, Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), 2005.

Gone So Far (chapbook), Barnwood Press, 2005.

Blue Front, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2006.

Sheer (chapbook), Barnwood Press, 2008.

Contributor to periodicals, including Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and AGNI. Editor at Field magazine and Oberlin College Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

Martha Collins is a poet and writer and former professor of English and creative writing. In her collection of poems titled The Arrangement of Space, the author provides "an impressionistic overview of the dynamics of a poetic mind," according to a Publishers Weekly contributor. The collection begins with a group of poems titled "Women in American Literature: An Introduction," in which the author examines how women have struggled to be recognized in the highest levels of the literary community. In another section, titled "A Book of Days," the author presents lyrics focusing on her memories compared to her current view of people, places, and more. A section of six thematically linked poems is also included.

The poems in A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet: Poems "achieve a perfect balance of the horrific and the playful," wrote another contributor to Publishers Weekly. In this collection, the author covers a wide range of disturbing topics revealing human beings' inhumanity, from the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps to the horrors of the Gulf War. Fred Marchant, writing in the Boston Review, noted: "Here the boundaries of consciousness and selfhood have become wonderfully porous, allowing the world—in all its raucous, distracting, surprising transformations—to come rushing in." Marchant went on to write in the same review: "In the midst of the whirlwind, in the midst of sentences crowded with competing and heart-rending pressures, one comes away from this book with the sense that here is a voice that has managed to make temporary but expansive shelters of meaning."

Collins's book Blue Front is a long poem focusing on a lynching that her father witnessed in his hometown of Cairo, Illinois, when he was five years old. In an interview on the Cervena Barva Press Web site, the author discussed the book, noting: "Part lyric and part narrative, the book is more collage than straightforward narrative. It includes fragments of sometimes conflicting evidence, and a great deal of speculation about what the experience might have meant to my father."

The lynching described by Collins occurred in 1909 when a black man, Will James, who was suspected of raping and killing a white woman, was hanged by a group of townspeople on a downtown street. When the rope broke, James was cut down, while still alive, and dragged through the streets. He was eventually shot and burned, and parts of his body were passed around as souvenirs. Noting that "nothing about the narrative is straight," New York Times Book Review contributor Dana Goodyear added: "Her discursive, breathless, self-contradicting, breaking-off-and-circling-back technique makes the book feel like the testimony of a traumatized witness." In her telling of the story, the author quotes from newspaper accounts of the lynching as well as her own father's recollections. She also includes snippets from various documents, including letters, postcards, and eyewitness reports. In addition, the collection of poems follows her father's life into adulthood and examines the civil rights movement in the South. Collins also follows the continuation of racism in Cairo on through the 1970s.

In a review of Blue Front in Publishers Weekly, a contributor noted that the author "creates at once a compelling, bristling story and a collage of evidence about white guilt." Janet St. John wrote in Booklist that Blue Front is "a powerful statement about America and a potent reminder of human kind's terrible potential."

Collins is also the editor and translator, with Nguyen Quang Thieu, of Thieu's collection of Vietnamese poems titled The Women Carry River Water: Poems. "The author, who has referred to himself as a ‘dreamy poet,’ provides psychological insights, but more remarkably, the assembled creations here succeed in expressing and sharing his culture through imagery and music," noted Dunh-Hoa Nguyen in World Literature Today.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1993, Pat Monaghan, review of A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet: Poems, p. 1773; May 1, 2006, Janet St. John, review of Blue Front, p. 65.

Boston Review, June-September, 1994, Fred Marchant, review of A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet.

Georgia Review, spring, 1994, Judith Kitchen, review of A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, p. 162.

Internet Bookwatch, August, 2006, review of Blue Front.

Library Journal, August, 1991, Kathleen Norris, review of The Arrangement of Space, p. 105.

Ms. Magazine, March-April, 1994, June Jordan, review of A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, p. 70.

New York Times Book Review, September 24, 2006, Dana Goodyear, "A Face in the Crowd," review of Blue Front.

Pleiades, Volume 17, review of Blue Front,, p. 1.

Poet Lore, spring-summer, 2007, review of Blue Front.

Prairie Schooner, fall, 2007, Mihaela Moscaliuc, review of Blue Front, p. 156.

Publishers Weekly, August 9, 1991, review of The Arrangement of Space, p. 53; June 7, 1993, review of A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, p. 65; November 30, 1998, review of Some Things Words Can Do, p. 69; May 1, 2006, review of Blue Front, p. 39.

World Literature Today, spring, 1998, Dunh-Hoa Nguyen, review of The Women Carry River Water: Poems, p. 465.