Description
With its vast prairie stretching out before them and infinite stars spreading above, poets—including the women in Drawing Flowers from Earth—have found Oklahoma fertile ground for their craft. This anthology is a revelation and a celebration of the extraordinary poetry produced by Oklahoma women in the first half of the twentieth century. These are poems that reflect a time of great change in the world and in the private lives of the women who wrote them. From the restless beauty of a prairie wind "pulling at the pillars of heaven" to the baffled sorrows of "souls who eat apart on dusty bread," the poems gathered here reckon with forces as alive today as when they were written. In these pages readers will find an attorney providing harsh commentary on the exploitation of women in tent towns during the oil boom period; a Cherokee citizen offering a scathing review of Manifest Destiny; and an African American teacher considering the constant warfare endured at home and abroad by members of her community. Women writers adopt male personae, speak in colloquial voices, celebrate the working class, and call for civil rights. They write of Indigenous culture and sovereignty, landscape and the natural world, national figures and heroes, and various shades of love and romance and the cycles of life. Drawing Flowers from Earth is the work of women who never published their own poetry collections, recovered from archives and historical publications, curated and contextualized by four scholars of Oklahoma literature and history. The poems' shared embrace of arresting and unpredictable creative expressions, through a range of content, styles, visions, and philosophies, reaches deep beneath the Oklahoma soil, gazes far beyond the stars, and reveals the world of possibilities in between.