I first met the poet January Gill O'Neil when I was a student at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. I was enrolled in a workshop with Ms. O'Neil on the subject of poetic revision—a valuable aspect of the craft of any maturing poet. When I mentioned that I was having difficulties finding a publisher for my poetry volume, she replied, "That's because the poems are not yet finished." She taught me the art of paying close attention to revising my poems—line breaks, syntax, closure. I remember the time I spent after her workshop diving into my poems again and carefully rewriting each one.
The poems of Glitter Road are carefully created and constructed with the substance of memory, adventure, and experience. Ms. O'Neil was the 2019–2020 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Many of these poems were conceived and penned in the environs of Oxford, Mississippi. We know the poet must have experienced firsthand the dilemmas of race, the history of segregation, and the surviving celebration of a long-past, long-dead Confederacy.
The volume opens with an epigram quoting Toi Derricotte, founder of Cave Canem, an organization dedicated to the future of African American poetry—"Joy is an act of resistance." We learn through these poems of the sheer joy of Black woman creativity, as well as the power of women speaking out against injustice and evil. In the poem "Narcissi in January," the poet celebrates the feeling of being alive in mid-winter while extoling her own name:
Hard to love. Two-faced, the coldest month of the year. January, the first narcissi are breaking
the surface. Green spring stalks bob their bright white heads, sway in the air— my name attached to each one.
But the possibility of poetry as protest also circulates through this work in the poems titled "No Joke," "Driving Through Mississippi After the Capitol Hill Riot," and "On Hearing Mississippi's Governor Declare April 'Confederate Heritage Month."' The South she portrays is a South that is clinging to its questionable history. She writes, "If you say, 'this, too, shall pass,' then you don't understand trauma, how it seeps into a landscape, where every inch of land has been touched by enslaved hands. I think of a war that's far from civil in a state overcrowded with Old South statues.
Yet still Ms. O'Neil revels in her poet's love of the land and the beauty of the Southern landscape in "The River Remembers": "Here's the nadir of our suffering, / which started in one place to end in another. / Here's where flow and marvel and history converge. / This harmjoy. This beautiful sadness." Glitter Road also explores the failure of her marriage, solitude, and renewal and rejuvenation through a new intimate relationship. The notion that a woman's consciousness can transcend cruelty and embrace love pervades this work. These are poems of the dark, the light, the strange and the familiar.
