"What is my life? What is in my life? Why now do I understand rest, and the connection between body and mind?" "Do I still believe I can find color and joy and openness daily? Can I make a declaration with awareness of ability, oh, and Where am I going?"
In Iris Gersh's debut collection of poetry, A Thousand Questions, questions appear often without answers. Her book of poems describes a scattered life, a few attempts at fitting in, changes in lifestyle from a kid growing up in the Shawangunk country with a spirited, and almost always emotional Jewish family. Along her route, she writes about "Crazy Women" and "Fear in America" as well as navigating dental care in "Your Teeth".
When the early seventies sounded the death knoll for a Liberal Art's Degree, and 150 resumes landed not one response for her, Gersh took a job at as a unit clerk in a heroin detoxification unit. She thought that further education in and of itself was probably a good idea for the future of someone else. In the summer of 1973, she accepted her brother's invitation to live up at Lama Mountain in northern New Mexico. Few details had been revealed either to her or her parents, and those six years of living in an intentional community, the years in her twenties, the seventies in Taos, are her happiness and the time that she gains survival skills, physical and spiritual.
Many years later in her mid-forties, Gersh takes a chance on love when she moves to Greece. A Thousand Questions leaves us wondering why. The author feels that the most resonating pieces are of Greece where she spent eight years living with her boyfriend. Why had she stayed in the face of emotional abuse?
Angelos Sikelianos is one of the author's favorite poets. In his poem "The Sacred Way", the narrator says, "But farther on, as if the world/had disappeared and nature alone was left/ unbroken stillness reigned. And the rock I found/rooted at the roadside seemed like a throne/long predestined for me." These words have led her to believe that she too has learned the skill of turning a "rock into a throne." Delusion or illusion?
In the writer's mind, the Catskills were a blur of skedding down hills and staying indoors in the wintry weather. How could it be just that? In writing this book, Gersh discovers the makeup of her original family, different from her original narrative, and tells stories of her younger years in her poems, such as in "Grandma Rebecca" and "Mahogany Night Stick".
When her "shell of her former self," as a niece described her upon her return to New Mexico, dropped down in Albuquerque, she was home. Whereas the commune days gave her the impression Albuquerque was just an airport, living here in the last fifteen years has made her feel part of a "place family" where she is involved in many local poetry readings and events. The high desert landscapes, the Sandias, the Rio Grande bosque-all have imbued her spirit during these challenging times.
