Reviews of Côte Blanche
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“Martha Serpas is, in a highly individual way, a Catholic devotional poet from Louisiana, and she has perfected this, her first book, across fifteen years. Many rereadings persuade me that a double handful of these poems may achieve permanence. Like Elizabeth Bishop, her strong precursor, Martha Serpas practices a severely chastened art of poetry . . . I am moved to prophesy a considerable poetic development for her.”

—from the Foreword by Harold Bloom

“Lucid, yet luscious; rich, yet modest; full of spiritual insight, yet empty of bossy certainty, Serpas’s book of love and death in a Louisiana landscape is as savory and abundant as the rhythms she employs.”

—Molly Peacock

“Though she possesses—preeminently—some of the virtues with reason imputed to the engaging poet: accuracy of vision, for instance, and solicitude of address (her raptures are focused), Martha Serpas has a quality rare among such poets as engage us, and that is sustenance, a nurturing attention to her landscape, her weather, her personnel, off which one never feels she might be scoring for the poem’s sake, but rather to which she pays heed in order to sustain, to develop the Thing Itself even before she aggrandizes her sentiments, her judgments. This is how George Eliot, if she had written poems as compassionate as her fiction, might have proceeded, and it is certainly with such gifts that Serpas prevails.”

—Richard Howard

"Cote Blanche is the first book of poems by Martha Serpas. A forward by Harold Bloom, America's heavyweight literary critic, is both a surprising and honorable introduction to this volume. In his introduction, Bloom goes so far as to remark that 'a double handful of these poems may achieve permanence.' The poems of Cote Blanche live up to Bloom's praise. Serpas' work is not grandiose, but it is shocking. Rarely is such muted magnificence guessed at, much less realized. In 'A Life Without Worry' the speaker laments her uneasiness and complains about the heat. The lines build a scene and psychology, but they are also gentle and domestic in their musings. However, once the pristine scene is complete, the speaker opens a realm of disquiet with a subtle realization, and the characters seem to vanish just as they appeared. To quote lines from this book seems risky, as the individual lines are not cultivated to communicate as the whole poems manage to page after page. Martha Serpas' gift for narrative propels these poems of bucolic Louisiana. This incredible book evokes not only the author's weighty but uncertain wisdom, it captures the world in which this wisdom lives."

—IMAGE, www.imagejournal.org

“The title of Martha Serpas’ first collection of poetry, Côte Blanche, introduces a dichotomy present in most of the poems: it refers both to the harsh but beautiful landscape and culture of Serpas’ native Louisiana and a mystical plane of revelation and transcendence for which the Catholic speaker longs. …The fusion of Serpas’ subtle yet complex poetic and theological sensibility and dialectic with bayou particulars and argot is why these poems—emotionally, intellectually, and anagogically—are so compelling and successful.”

—Adam Vines, Birmingham Poetry Review

"Miracles happen at the water's edge - baptism, discipleship, a thirst for adventure, re-connection with ancient symbols of regeneration. In her
collection titled Cote Blanche, poet Martha Serpas . . . invites us to become immersed in landscapes along Louisiana's low bayou country where 'Cote Blanche' is the name given by French cajun settlers to the 'White Coast' salt islands and inlets that encroach upon towns like St. Charles Crossing, Grand Caillou, and Port Fourchon. With the sure skill of a child grown up by the sea, Serpas navigates back to this briny world of characters she casts as pilgrims of a 'roustabout God.' She is a word artist drawing the reader into vivid descriptions of tough working men, of wives who count rosaries 'before a dark space in the wall' and a chorus of familiar voices, living and dead, that speak their experience of 'time we saved, forgot, then lost.'

—Carole Timin, The Democrat

Foreword by Harold Bloom
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Though new poets and their poems reach me all but Sundays, only very rarely do they find me (to take a turn from Coleridge). Martha Serpas is, in a highly individual way, a Catholic devotional poet from Louisiana, and she has perfected this, her first book, across fifteen years. Many rereadings persuade me that a double handful of these poems may achieve permanence. Like Elizabeth Bishop, her strong precursor, Martha Serpas practices a severely chastened art of poetry. “St. Charles Crossing” is a subtle tribute to Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and is appropriately this volume’s first poem, after the poignant invocation, “As If There Were Only One.” The Augustinian title marks this as a reconversion to life, after the trauma of a beloved father’s early death. “God loves each of us as if/there were only one of us” is not an assertion that I believe, but Serpas makes it more urgent for me than I thought it could be. Baruch Spinoza said that we must learn to love God without ever expecting that He would love us in return, but that heals no traumas, though increasingly I believe it to be true.

Elizabeth Bishop’s ways of seeing and her self-detachment never quite abandon Serpas, yet the great poet of North and South, A Cold Spring, and Geography III was a secular artist, who renounced transcendence. Serpas ultimately compels me to associate her with Christina Rossetti, rather than with Bishop or Dickinson. Devotional poetry of high aesthetic quality is difficult to locate in the early twenty-first century. Serpas’s, in poems like “Temples” and “St. Joseph, Upside Down and Lost,” comes out of the cosmos of Flannery O’Connor, but the temperamental affinity with the poet of Goblin Market remains. “Return" is a poem that Christina Rossetti would have understood, as she was expert in what Freud memorably called: "the work of mourning.”

Serpas’s Côte Blanche alternately could be titled The Work of Mourning. Certain passages in the book are already possessed by my memory, and will not leave me:

        In Louisiana green accuses you,
spreads like gossip and will not grieve.
It mats rows of whitewashed tombs,
small chapels veiled in ivy bloom.

One expects a mystical poet to be an erotic poet also, the two kinds being so close. Serpas’s love poems are both heterosexual and lesbian, but she kindles more in the latter, as in the wonderful opening of “In the Garden”:
There we are in the Garden:

she a stone’s throw away—
my back to fruit trees—
I watch her
and touch my side.

None of my ribs are missing.
Her body is her own.

How shrewd the Yahwist,
joining the first lovers with flesh,

with the fierceness

Of self-love: the creature craves
a lost bone and tumbles right out of Paradise.

This dark wit juxtaposes two different ways of sexual desire, intimating a reply to critiques calling for “otherness.” Serpas’s poetry, up to this time, reaches its own wisdom in the final three poems of this volume. “Hell, Late Twentieth Century,” takes its starting point from Canto XI of Dante’s Inferno, the vision of those who suffer for having been “sullen in the sweet air” of God’s Creation:

bright fruit we ignored or ate with no taste
sharp winter days we groped past, or slept
through, and that retriever who chased

us from bed to bath, carrying
ball then bone in adoration—we reach
into yellow vapor, touch nothing,
and scratch the air of her head and ears.

I am moved almost to tears by this, though the particulars are no t my own, but all of us have wept when we might have been joyous.

As befits an Augustinian mystic, Serpas is strongest in her poem on “Conversion,” though her immediate reference is the movement of resurrection from mourning to more life:

But then, to the right of the road,
the shoulder leapt with sunflowers,
the blue sky dangled like a scarf,

And the part of me that was buried
came back like the dead after hard rain,
just pushed up the glass lid

And stepped onto solid ground. Backwater rises
to its own schedule, covers the highways,
you can’t tell the bayou’s banks

From the road’s edge, and then there’s no question
of staving off conversion.
Even the dead won’t be held down.

The bayou, all through this book, has intimated a freshening of existence. In the final poem, “Finishing Touch,” dedicated to her lover, Serpas extends her mastery of her art. I hear an overtone of James Merrill in:

                                 I know this,
and still I have to ask for reprieve

in illusion, to linger in this present
flesh, believe in her finishing touch.

The allusion, to an erotic master, is raised to transcendence, since, as always, Serpas is her own highly original kind of Catholic mystical celebrant. The poem is governed by Michelangelo’s vision, on the Sistine ceiling, of God creating Adam, and dares to compound erotic and Divine finishing touch:

                                  Each hand found.
more skillful than the last, each imprint closer
to Your transforming seal.

A sense of something freshly molded lingers in Martha Serpas’s lyricism. I am moved to prophesy a considerable poetic development for her.