Terra Oliveira writes— “may our work be God' s work,” with these few words she is able to implement a strong understanding of how God is present in our everyday life, lifetimes, and even in our ancestral forms. A never ending lineage that follows spirit. Terra Oliveira reminds us how writing poetry is God’s work.
Unpaid work.
Itinerant Songs answers many questions for me. Two of them being: How do we live? How do we continue to survive in the conditions of the world? This world. These spinning material conditions. This world. These spinning material conditions. In the matters in which we carry Work, Country, and Going Home. Impressions of the external and internal forces. To where do we turn? Where do we make a wage to live on? The answers are in this poetic capturing of the times we are living,
“The dialectic is that we won’t always, can’t always, live
Like this.”
& it is the “blue light becoming action and flesh” that aids us, weaves us through the spectrums, multiplicities of perceptions, in which we travel through. The homes Terra has existed in, exist here in this poetry. We have Terra’s close encounters of new beginnings, possibilities, and imaginations through prayer, through songs. The public and private contemplating in the intimacies of these pages. And in a moment of rest I ask myself: When does private become public? When does the public become private?
We read through these moments, witness the quiet movements such as “I say a prayer on the bathroom floor”
and
The portions and instances where “day after day, more of us enter the fog,”
Surviving
Breathing
Inhaling
Exhaling
“The thick mud of living”
Itinerant Songs gives us gifts of coin words, addressing truths we must reiterate time and time again to not forget: the Ancestral dialects, prayers induced from the air, water and earth. To not forget: of the homes we create, that are destroyed, inherited— to others, of the homes we leave they never felt like homes, yet we can not forget. Do not forget: “the house of the lord is forever”.
In the mentions of the landlords, open fields, student debt, ancestors, God, phones, pleasure & pain there is… healing. Revealing where, and how it all occurs during these times are the written capsules in which Oliveira evokes the deer spirit, animals spirits and guides. Sources of metaphors—- a gentle language forming from small gestures. She encapsulates miracles as landscapes, spaces to sit in, dive in, listen to and be in silence with. Dedicated all to feeling, sensing and continuation of existence.
Terra Oliveira provides more than an understanding. She gives us freedom. And to read Itinerant Songs is a force, a patience. A deep witnessing of the verbal nouns… that brings forth an absolution.
“Absolution is for everybody”
Profoundly, I sat with Oliveira’s work before completing this writing. Giving myself time to process and listen. With great expansion Terra made me feel. I have no other expressions, but to write more of her words here:
“Now go ahead, wherever you
go but come quickly there is something
I need to tell you.”
Terra Oliveira is the author of Itinerant Songs, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. A finalist in the 2024 Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, The Common, Puerto del Sol, Protean Magazine, and more.
Her poetry and illustration collection, An Old Blue Light, won the Where Are You Press Poetry Contest in 2015, and she has been awarded international residencies at The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu at the Great Wall of China, and elsewhere. With a degree in documentary film production from San Francisco State University, she has published two photography books featured in BUST Magazine, SELF Magazine, and others, and her films have screened at Napa Valley Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, and around the world.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, her family lineages migrated from the Hawaiian Islands, the Azores, Southern China, Guadalajara, and throughout Europe. Her work is an extension of her core practices and beliefs: in recovery, community, pilgrimage and retreat, and peoples' movements globally.
Her poetry and illustration collection, An Old Blue Light, won the Where Are You Press Poetry Contest in 2015, and she has been awarded international residencies at The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu at the Great Wall of China, and elsewhere. With a degree in documentary film production from San Francisco State University, she has published two photography books featured in BUST Magazine, SELF Magazine, and others, and her films have screened at Napa Valley Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, and around the world.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, her family lineages migrated from the Hawaiian Islands, the Azores, Southern China, Guadalajara, and throughout Europe. Her work is an extension of her core practices and beliefs: in recovery, community, pilgrimage and retreat, and peoples' movements globally.