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1940, Half Moon Bay

From A Staircase of Roots
By Janet Winans

I claim again
what was begun.
Two sisters
on a winter beach,
our mother by the car
or beachcombing, not far,
for feathers and shells.
We haul driftwood
from a tangle
with tar-smeared hands
to make a house
which will do
for our settling.  Frame
of planks, carpet of sand,
window here, door
there, apple crate table
kelp napkins, our plates
flattened cans.  Too soon
the fog flows in,
tide threatening and
we must leave.  But
what was well begun
remains.

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 STAIRCASE OF ROOTS
By Janet Winans 

 In her first full-length collection, Janet Winans brings an astute eye to two lives:  urban beginnings in San Francisco  and her present  life in an Arizona hamlet, amidst thin populations, scattered tribes, and lost towns.  What holds the two worlds in common is her way of finding habitats “between the cracks, / beyond the lines.”  In both worlds, her chutzpah is a joy, whether as a child dashing down a beach in the knowledge that “No one was ever swifter nor / surer, no one more resolute” – or as a woman riding toward home down a familiar horse trail “over a staircase of roots,” she and the horse sometimes stopping to “lick drinks from shale / slick and gray as clay.”

 

 

 

 

 


Praise for Staircase of Roots

The finest details revive and signify as they touch the heart of memory, and the past is warmed again by long holding, deep affection, the recovered feel of things, like those coffee mugs "smooth as eggshell, cursive-handled Texas-ware, plain / as a potato / unremarkable.  //  Except to those of us / those summer mornings, holding in both hands the steam."                        

     —Eleanor Wilner

Janet Winans' careful, respectful observations are sacraments of emotional clarity.  Her poems seem inevitable, as if they have always existed, and in that spirit, move us out of ourselves toward larger meaning.  Winans writes in "Farm House, Colfax, California": "Sometimes a house finds its person" — which makes me understand that sometimes, if a poem has been nurtured and shaped through wisdom and patience, it will find its reader.  How fortunate to be one here.

                                                        —Pam Bernard

I have followed Janet Winans' work for many years and have come to see how much she is most a poet of observation, but I do not mean this in any standard way.  The poems work not with the simple decoration of observation but with the intensity of what makes an observation arresting to begin with: In a word, she wresltes, and quite successfully, with feeling.  She is at work being alive in the world, moving through it as we all are but with the gift, the earnest gift, of seeing into things.

     —Alberto Rios