The Rebirth of the Older Child

Author: Brita Bergland

Publisher: Burning Deck (1993)

Brita Bergland's poems fuse a sophisticated, Wittgensteinian sense of language with a predilection for the "rural voice," the "whacky grandeur" of everyday life on a farm. The poems celebrate language as resurrection in the hands of the politically forgotten and emotionally uncalled for, all seen through the metaphor of the haystack. The results are provocative, sometimes very funny and certainly all her own.

“In Rebirth of the Older Child, the poet sniffs out an examined life’s peculiar pleasures. . . . Weirdly revealing lines like ‘His mother was an O’ and ‘Darkened DNA polishes my lips’ seem fresh, exact. Bergland’s poems reveal a carnal nature nurtured in the out-of-doors. Simple—and exciting.”

–Chris Potash

“What I like most about these poems, set mostly in the country, is the playing around with languages. . . . The effect of such writing is the music—the spiel, and cut and sway of the words, a funny and grotesque way. . . . Isn’t the title calling for a revision of our attitudes, from inside out, the way Thoreau called for a purification of the self and a rebirth? . . . The natural flow is inviting, sensual, beautiful and awkward in the musicales of current containing the history of a native people.”

–Shelby Stephenson