Review by Lynda La Rocca
Poetry – August 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Bitter Creek Junction – Poetry of the American West
by Linda M. Hasselstrom
Published in 2000 by High Plains Press
ISBN: 0-931271-53-3
THE POETRY of the American West has its own unique flavor — peppery and biting as a clear blue mountain morning, salty as a sweat-stained Stetson, yet sweet as wild strawberries speckling a forest floor.
In her latest collection, Bitter Creek Junction, poet and nonfiction author Linda M. Hasselstrom captures these sensations in profoundly moving poetry that is, at times, almost clinical in its clarity.
Whether she’s watching a heron strike a silver fish, making chokecherry jam in her kitchen beside the ghosts of her grandmothers, or planting flowers on the grave of her true love, Hasselstrom’s words are a branding iron to the soul, reflecting the soaring joy and deep despair that define the universal quest for meaning and purpose.
Her unblinking depictions of the harsh, dark side of contemporary rural life are finely counterbalanced by her compassion for, and understanding of, the people who live that life.
In “Where the Stories Come From,” a hard, disillusioned young cowboy, high on whatever substance briefly dulls his pain, meets Death on a graveled back road, and is “baffled when the stars come down to meet him.” The collection’s title poem portrays a battered woman toiling in a ramshackle convenience store-cum-saloon who finally murders to escape her tormentor.
She’ll run the bar the way she always did,
add the money to her hideout cash.
Stay out of trouble. Maybe move
next summer. Find some place
where she can walk in sunshine
with her daughter,
humming an old blues tune.
But it’s the elegies — to Hasselstrom’s crusty rancher father, an ancient cowhand, a long-lost girlfriend, and especially to her husband, Jerry — that really cut to the bone.
When “A Northern Woman Takes the Golden Road,” despairing, desperate and
tired of locking my doors
against well-meaning friends,
tired of waiting for my dead husband
to come back…
the journey quietly imbues her with the strength to “begin to seek my life without him.”
Still, when she finally finds that life, and a new love, there is always Jerry. In “Pesto, on the Anniversary of Your Death,” the poet recalls her soul mate as she snips fresh basil, an herb, she writes, that some cultures equate with pain and mourning, others with eternal bliss. Tonight, she tells Jerry, when she and her new man “savor pesto over pasta,” she will
laugh full-hearted in the candle glow,
loving you no less.
Equally memorable are poems like “Rhubarb Pie,” in which the poet releases the daughter she never had, the heartbreaking “Reading in Bed,” and “Jigsaw Dance,” one of several poems specifically dedicated to Jerry, in which the ordinary activity of piecing together a jigsaw puzzle mirrors the lovers’ interlocking bodies and souls.
Like threads in a tapestry, Hasselstrom’s poems combine to create a present that sustains both poet and reader through its strongly knotted ties to the past.
Bitter Creek Junction is a book that everyone should read, laugh, and cry over — and cherish forever.
