Savings by Linda Hogan
"**Savings**" is the fifth poetry collection by Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw writer and educator, which builds on themes explored in her previous works. The poems in this collection are characterized by a discursive, low-key style and often adopt longer forms than her earlier pieces. Hogan experiments with poetic structure, exemplified in works like "The New Apartment: Minneapolis," where she utilizes loose unrhymed couplets. Thematically, "Savings" reflects on personal, familial, and tribal histories, while also engaging with broader global issues such as justice, care, and responsibility.
Hogan's writing addresses significant social concerns, including the abuse of women, class struggles, and the plight of refugees. The poem "The Other Voices" juxtaposes the experiences of oppressed individuals with the mundane lives of domestic animals, highlighting the contrast between everyday life and societal evils. Through meditative reflections in "Workday," the speaker grapples with the weight of global suffering amidst routine tasks. Additionally, Hogan explores themes of aging and women's connection to the earth, as seen in poignant pieces that celebrate resilience and history, such as "It Must Be" and "Scorpion." Overall, "Savings" offers a rich tapestry of interconnected narratives that resonate with diverse perspectives on hardship and survival.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Savings by Linda Hogan
First published: 1988
The Work
Savings, Linda Hogan’s fifth collection of poems, continues and expands themes initiated in her earlier works and provides a perspective on the development of the poet’s work in the ten years since the publication of her first collection. The poems in Savings tend to be discursive and low-key, and many are longer than the poet’s characteristic work in other books. In contrast to her usual free verse forms, in this book Hogan experiments with form, as in the loose unrhymed couplets of “The New Apartment: Minneapolis.”
Hogan’s thematic preoccupations include a sense of hardship endured and overcome in her personal, family, and tribal history. She also includes in her writing a wider consideration of global issues of justice, care, and responsibility. She uses a characteristic method of building from image to image and sometimes grafts an image to more abstract expression, as in “The Legal System.” In this poem the reader hears an ambiguous voice suggesting that the internalization of a “legal system” within the individual reflects and predicts the judgments and prejudices of the individual and of society.
The poems in Savings reach out from Chickasaw history and the Oklahoma landscape to embrace allusions to major contemporary injustices. Abuse of women, alcoholism, class hostility, the holocaust, refugees from oppressive regimes, undocumented immigrants, poverty, and bigotry are mentioned. In “The Other Voices,” the speaker attempts to come to terms with an overpowering evil by contrasting unspecified refugees fleeing a police state with the commonplace, unthreatening lives of domestic animals, like chickens and horses. In “Workday” a speaker meditates through a workday—going to work, sitting in a meeting, riding the bus—on torture and mutilation happening elsewhere in the world, on past losses of children, and on pervasive poverty and drudgery.
Women and the aging process also receive attention in these works of the poet’s mature career. “What Has Happened to These Working Hands?” is a catalog of the many tasks the old woman has performed again and again through her life: planting seeds, caring for children and the aged, kneading bread, and even striking out physically against wrongdoing. In “It Must Be” an elderly woman speaks out, voicing her sense of herself as a person of integrity with a precious history against the cold, impersonal probings of doctors, social workers, and other functionaries. Continuing a theme from earlier works are the poems that connect people, especially women, with the earth. One of the most striking of these is “Scorpion,” in which the reader is reminded that this creature, feared and derided for its poisonous power, was once a goddess.
Bibliography
Ackerberg, Peggy Maddux. “Breaking Boundaries: Writing Past Gender, Genre, and Genocide in Linda Hogan.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (1994): 7-14.
Hogan, Linda. “A heart made out of crickets’: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Interview by Bo Scholer. The Journal of Ethnic Studies 16, no. 1 (1988): 107-117.
Hogan, Linda. “An Interview with Linda Hogan.” The Missouri Review 17, no. 2 (1994): 109-124.
Hogan, Linda. “Linda Hogan.” Interview by Patricia Clark Smith. In This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Esturoy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.