East, West, and Beyond

Ms. Dyc’s vivid and moving poems take the reader on a journey of mind, body, and spirit through geographical and cultural distances: from childhood in Detroit with her Polish immigrant grandparents to mid-life in the West among Native Americans. As the title of her poem “Paying Attention” directs, she observes people and landscapes not only with her eyes, but with her heart. Her poetry of life and rituals among the Lakota are particularly vibrant. “Beyond,” the transcendent, reveals its presence through people and landscapes through-out this collection until, in meditative tones, Dyc envisions the end in her last quietly stunning poem:
I imagine this is how it will be in the end
a brightening of a candle in a paper lantern
and then a darkness lighter than light.
This is a collection to treasure!
Joan Gartland, reviewer for “Library Journal”
Always it’s hard to get beyond distance, but we try no matter how hard the journey is. It’s never a simple matter of crossing the prairie from the Black Hills to more mountains to more prairie. It’s mostly the same landscape of the exterior and the interior, i.e., what’s outside of us and what’s inside of us-and what matters is the truth as poet Gloria Dyc shows us excruciatingly in East West and Beyond. Her poems even make us realize what we remember are maps and what we don’t remember are maps too!
Simon J. Ortiz, poet, author of “Woven Stone”
I’m just a guy from Queens, New York, but Gloria Dyc’s “Thinning the Herd” in this collection speaks to me in its language of herds, corrals, lactating mares, and scarce hay due to drought – because the colts have to be sold to buy hay and pay for a funeral, and a boy has to accept this, and the mare’s milk leaks out onto the snow as they walk . . . As always, in art it’s not always things that move us, but how people and other living creatures live amongst and react to those things.
Morty Sklar, The Spirit That Moves Us Press
Led not by a hum but by an opera, you follow this poet wherever she goes, riding on the music, trusting, every minute, in her creation.
lily pond, editor of “Seven Hundred Kisses: A Yellow Silk Book of Erotic Writing” (Harper Row, San Francisco)