Metates and Other Poems

Metates is a book of poetic landscapes from Virginia and Florida westward to west Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Hawaii. Urban settings similarly have their place, with examples from Paris and New Orleans. More broadly, the book is about what is given to us in the way of scenes, circumstances, and bodies, and our connections to all that. Landscapes and other settings are not inert; they are what we attempt to make of them. Metates is, therefore, about us and our responses to what we encounter. 

Both personal experience and imagination, sometimes mythological, suggest human ingenuity in reacting to the given. Kinship and friendship have their place. Memory appears as both a resource and a motif. Nostalgia characterizes many poems. It may be admixed with grief. Meanwhile, around us, nature, in many forms, affords us its consolations.

From the opening poem, with its motif of the oracle, to the final sonnets, concerning fortune and chance, destiny makes itself felt. While it enables us, offering opportunities, it imposes boundaries. Though, like the metates (grinding stones) that facilitated pre-Columbian life, destiny may weigh on us in its inescapability; the stones are evidence of life’s dependencies.

 

About the Author

Catharine Savage Brosman is known throughout America as a poet, essayist, writer of short fiction, and literary historian of both French and American literature. She is professor emerita of French at Tulane University.

 

Praise for Metates

“In Metates, Brosman reminds us that this passing through we call a life is made of holy encounters at every turn. The poems are delivered in a voice that aspires to ‘sing my affinities as in a chapel.’ The fields it plies are the fields of being: experience, observation, memory, desire, love, and the lovely physical world we live in.”—Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007–2011

“[Brosman] gives us yet another excellent collection, filled with superbly right metaphors . . . suggesting that, for this poet, ‘Such perspectives / support order in the mind, design / a field for acts’ (from ‘Clearwater Beach,’ one of the finest poems in the book). . . . There can be no question whatsoever that Brosman is one of the most important poets in America today.”—Jonathan Chaves, professor of Chinese, George Washington University

“Whether writing of the visions of great artists or a fine dinner with friends in her beloved New Orleans, Catharine Savage Brosman paints with words a book of pictures her readers will not soon forget. . . . The intricate designs and deeply sensorial images in Brosman’s work . . . remind us of the timeless need and desire for poetry as wise and abundant with life as the poems in Metates.”—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

 

© 2025 Catharine Savage Brosman

Paperback, 52 pages | 5" x 8" | ISBN: 978-1-959569-29-9 | September 2025