A WOMAN IN PIECES CROSSED A SEA
Bergman's masterful narrative, told in lyric pieces, of the transportation, installation, and metaphorical presence of the Statue of Liberty, serves not only as a paean to the work of her transporters but as a meditation on the arrival of the Lady Liberty in a land whose history she can hardly hope to accommodate. Tactile, descriptive, and wise, these poems recover part of our history while delivering us to a still uncertain present.
—West End Press
I leap at any chance to read Denise Bergman's poetry. With her usual (unusual) imagination and political insight, we follow the Statue of Liberty from its conception in France to its reassembly in the United States. Bergman's lyrical language both humanizes and deconstructs her, and we are drawn by the multilayered poems into a liaison with a symbol and a work of art that we will now always see differently.
—Jean Hardisty, Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College
A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea is a collection of poems about one of the most iconic sculptures in the U.S. Bergman's poems assemble the pieces of the Statue of Liberty as she begins her journey from idea to Bedloe's Island. As the sculptor/poet creates each piece and reassembles the statue, the poems come together with economy of language and striking images that bears witness to a broader and newer story of the U.S.
—Laura Tohe, Arizona State University
A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea was the 2014 winner of West End Press's Patricia Clark Smith Poetry Prize.
Listen to the poet read from A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea
Review in Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices
University of New Mexico Press
Bookshop.org
SHE CROSSES BORDERS
On open-shackle feet
she crosses long dotted lines.
Crosses sketch to object,
ore to molten steel.
Hot to cold.
Small medium beyond large to huge.
Norway / France / New York.
Land / sea / land.
Piece, whole,
whole again to piece.
Ideal to real.
Then to now. Full to hollow.
Mother to metal.
Flesh to hammered skin.
Adamant to a five-inch sway in wind.
With a passport stamped change
and be the same,
a photo ID glib as a poster on a sheriff's wall
and signed, sealed documents
she crosses.
Fine, you say, fine. But then
who is she?
THE SCULPTOR AND HIS MOTHER
He knows no shackles
or shackles' welt,
no gash in a child's bosom, her mother
torn away.
He hasn't seen
this history's
bone-exposed bone.
But an artist can imagine,
sketch and build.
He thinks: each baby's first breath
is a breath.
Let mother be the look
he's looking for.
Where to start—
where did he start
and when did he know to break her
into parts,
when did he decide
stages of her reconstruction.
Germ of a colossal notion
the Sphinx, Rhodes.
A gist, handful, cake of ore,
commission secure,
do it big.
Mother on a stool beside the easel
turns three-quarters around.
Almond eyes, lids, chin—he sketches
top to bottom,
head to broken-shackle feet.