"Books for Winter Nights"
by Joy Parks
in The Body Politic, January 1986

For the past couple of years it has been almost impossible for a lesbian poet to present a book of love poetry without risking some political credibility. This is one of the reasons why Minnie Bruce Pratt’s second collection We Say We Love Each Other is so important. Here is love poetry that is filled with sensuality and power and completely devoid of sentimentality or posturing. The poems speak not only of private intimacies but also of Pratt’s love for women as an instrumental part of her political consciousness. She shows a genuine understanding of the conditions of women’s lives and a commitment to making changes.

Much of the work in this collection is filled with a sense of truth and continuity, a faith in love’s strength held up as a comforting ideal to even the most cynical reader. In "Stubborn As A Year Ago," she writes:

I have thistles in my house in a blue bottle
on my bookcase. They remind me of how we love.
This afternoon everything reminds me, but
at the moment it is thistles, in particular,

with their winged spiny stems, their flowers
become white hair, flying.
On Sunday I’ll be thirty-six,
stubborn as a year ago. You can’t touch
sometimes, it’s like grabbing knives. I know,

like you. And the way I admire your grey hairs,
you count mine. Perhaps new lovers always talk
of growing old together, wild and old.
I think we will, even if our hands have scars.

I know I’ve told you this before. But this minute
thistledown in the air was your hair, my breath.

Whether she writes of actual passion between women, fixing her beloved South, her childhood or her from pain or her attempts to protect lovers from rape by her love as a protective amulet, Pratt’s voice is honest and her skill sure. We Say We Love Each Other is both a study and celebration of love in all its aspects from a gifted writer whose dedication to both women and her craft is clear.  

Order Information
 

We Say We Love Each Other

Is available from:

Firebrand Books
2232 S. Main St. #272
Ann Arbor, MI 48102-6938
Phone:    248-738-8202
firebrand@firebrandbooks.com
http://www.firebrandbooks.com

paper ISBN 0-933216-13-0
cloth ISBN 0-932379-73-7