Lara Gularte’s unpublished manuscript of poetry, Above Paradise, explores the importance of landscape as connection to historical and cultural legacy. Not long ago people lived intimately with land, setting roots deep in place depending upon land and their knowledge of it for physical and psychological sustenance. We are drawn to a place because of the stories the landscape encloses, the memories it holds, or the beauty that calls us back again and again.
This collection is largely composed of narrative poems written in free verse about the experiences of Portuguese immigrants in the area of Scott Valley in northern California. Many of the poems are clustered around the theme of the poet/speaker searching for her family at her ancestral home place. The family members who could tell the speaker about her history are all dead and buried and she must look not only to her own memories, but to the land where her family once lived for answers. The narrator must resurrect her pioneer ancestors from the very ground where they were buried in order to know who they were and who she is. In exploring the geography of her family history the speaker develops a personal relationship with the landscape and comes to discover that the land remembers. The home place of her ancestors embraces myth, legend, fact and folklore communicating a physical and cultural legacy. A people can return to tell their tales.
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