Review of Amy Wray Irish's Creation Stories

Amy Wray Irish, Creation Stories
Green Fuse Community Press, 2008
Review by M.D. Friedman

In Creation Stories, a collection of original art and poetry, Amy Wray Irish creates a song of magic for the modern world. Her work acts as a womb of skin, for the recurring themes of creation and birth, which transports us as readers to a place of primal connection where we see nothing but beauty. In this volume, Amy becomes a priestess of word and image whose incantations launch us toward the journey into ourselves that we each must take.
Creation Stories opens with ”Shed", a piece in which the inner poet and artist, is itching to get out,/Ripping and twitching/to get out ." In Lady of Moths", this inner poet reveals that she is ready to leave behind anyone or anything that would blacken her window or prevent her from creating the new world of light she needs. Like many creation stories, she starts in darkness:
Mother, tell me this is not my voice,
This air raid siren
Bringing him to his knees;
Not my anger
As she examines the corporal for answers, she simply finds more questions:
So determined are our empty
Shells. So how do we know when we
Are simply hunger in the belly how do we know
When we are something more?
Then, in the "Birth of Venus," she answers her own question and finds the goddess within herself:
In the ebb of your own blood-red sea

You become more; you are truly
Born. Venus, taste of yourself,
Of your briny ocean
Mother. Aphrodite, become goddess

Of your own love.
In the second section of the collection, the speaker is consumed as she assumes her role as creator/mother/priestess/goddess/poet/artist. I swallowed this seed, and what I consumed/Consumes me whole, belly and all. It is a feeling with which poets and artists are all too familiar. It is in this role that she finds her magical powers:
When you feel heat sear from your fingertips,
The power to take hold, to explode
When you are reborn, purified,
An archangel rising on wings of light
Only then call me. Call me your mother,
Your lover, your twin. Matching flare
To fire, to flame. We will write
And set the world to blaze.
This call to set the world to blaze with poetry is at the heart of all the efforts of our Green Fuse Community. We must thank Amy Irish for this wonderful romp through "visionary states that flower /Beyond imagination".