The Collector of Bodies: Concern for Syria and the Middle East

A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria March 18 2011 the authors 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved and the manuscript continued. Glancy wrote as an observer--as someone who had talked to the students in the universities--who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria especially after listening to the unrest of the students. In the bright sunlight as they walked toward her smiling she felt an inexplicable point of grief. She heard the desire of the people to be free. Later following the uprising of civil war on the news she knew she was seeing the price the Syrians would pay for that desire. A visit to a foreign country leaves part of oneself in that place. But something in return is taken. This collection of poems explores the something that is taken with implications for the Christian believer and the issues involved. What can be done in a world full of refugees? Is there anything to do other than stand back and watch? To trace the complexities of being an alien in a foreign country and to also consider the strange intimacy of the story we all inhabit: this is what Diane Glancy asks us to do. She attends to this fractured uneasy impossible balance moving between the Middle East and her own story and rises up to the Divine the question of what to do in the face of unbearable human brutality and human tenderness. --Anne M. Doe Overstreet author of Delicate Machinery Suspended Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her 2014-15 books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education University of Nebraska Press (creative nonfiction) Report to the Department of the Interior University of New Mexico Press (poetry) and three novels Uprising of Goats (the voices of 10 Biblical women) One of Us (the church a murderer left in his wake) and Ironic Witness (a ministers wife finds herself in hell). Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships a Minnesota Book Award and an American Book Award.