A Bare Unpainted Table

Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and a member of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her small book, To Frighten a Storm, from Copper Canyon Press, won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. These are poems from a mature and wise consciousness that understands loss, grief, and the value of the unassailable "solaces we yearn for." One emerges from Cardiff's intense, complex meditations with a renewed sense of both the durability of the human spirit and its potential.