NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Glen Sorestad continues his poetic journey, seeking his family roots in Norway, capturing the small epiphanies in nature as he travels, or shaping the memories of those he has met and befriended. Sorestad's poems always reach for the dance of language, delivering a subtle clarity and overwhelming honesty of voice. As J.M.Bridgeman writes

Sorestad honours the ordinary in his poetry ... helps us see the meaning in everyday rituals.

	In the house of my father's father,
	where this mountain stillness
	tucked round him like a quilt,
	I drift off to sleep,
	Dream ancestral dreams

	...
	In the house of his childhood
	I dream my grandfather's dreams
	And I am a child as well.

	I try to imagine my grandfather,
	Ellend Lien, born here amid
	sheep bleat and cattle bawl,
	born beneath the overhang
	of brooding mountains whose names
	I do not know ...

	With each gravestone name I utter,
	I taste the blood of my past;
	...
	In this rain-spattered graveyard
		... I find
	my history carved in stone.

	His slight frame is frail,
	hair turned Artic white.
	His walk is slow, careful
	as if the stage were ice.
	...
	his whole being gathers fire.

	With the first clarion notes,
	jazz is pulsing in the veins,
	fingers flit across the keys.
	Each concert he ever played
	flows in his blood tonight.

	The sax man blows out the sun
	and lights up a riff of stars. He rocks
	black spruce to sleep, the night
	awake and the wind to rest.
	...
	The sax man blows the quarter-moon
	Down to waft above his shoulder.
	Wan birches and dark spruce tilt
	To gather his notes like gems.
	The sax man blows stars to dance.

		the dancing man
	and the little Mexican girl move
	against heat and stillness,
	move to the lilt of their voices—
	dance through ages,
	dance against time.