(It doesn’t feel appropriate to rate these poems.)
It’s rare that I’m grateful for bonus content in a book — in general I adhere firmly to the convict(It doesn’t feel appropriate to rate these poems.)
It’s rare that I’m grateful for bonus content in a book — in general I adhere firmly to the conviction that art ought to speak for itself. But what about art catalyzed by unimaginable experiences, art that represents an attempt to make sense of an unimaginable lifetime of experiences? How can I even begin to understand what Mosab Abu Toha has gone through? What does communication look like when the imagination fails?
These poems document what it means to watch as one’s homeland and one’s people are diminished and destroyed, bit by bit. The fear and pain are relentless. Every word is haunted by decades — generations, now — of oppression. So I deeply appreciate the frank glimpse into the life underlying the words that manage to find beauty and strength in horror. The Q&A helps readers to connect where we might otherwise be tempted to look away, overcome. If there’s anything I’m convinced of in these strange and terrible times, it’s the vital importance of witnessing and listening — and learning to combat injustice in big and small ways alike....more
Mary Oliver is one of those poets whose work seems like it ought to resonate, and there are certainly lines and stanzas and even entire poems herein tMary Oliver is one of those poets whose work seems like it ought to resonate, and there are certainly lines and stanzas and even entire poems herein that move me. But I can’t quite shake off the sensation that the strings are swelling and I’m feeling by design, because I ought to. There’s an uncomfortable sentimentality that makes me suspicious over and over again....more
I’m learning that a miracle isn’t a miracle without sacrifice, because when the birds brought manna, we ate the birds.
Paige Lewis documents the magic anI’m learning that a miracle isn’t a miracle without sacrifice, because when the birds brought manna, we ate the birds.
Paige Lewis documents the magic and the tragedies of the everyday. She notices what’s happening within and around her — and also what might happen. What happened already, what’s still hurting us years later, the memories in a constant state of being experienced over and over again. No need to rewind.
She knows that the foxes are back, that humans are animals, too, that the world is self-devouring and full of beauty. She’s beautiful, too, I guess, a girl who casually asserts that “[e]very man I meet dreams / of fucking me in star-clotted fields.” (The female body as tilled soil, y’know?) She’s the sort person who gets a visit from Saint Francis, patron saint of my adopted home, only to find him perpetually undressing in the corner of her apartment.
Confession: As a girl who has spent most of her life feeling not just undesired but undesirable, I struggle sometimes with sexy poets. What must it be like to write like Atalanta runs, fleet of foot and word and the knowledge that those guys in the fields would be her undoing? To be hunted by the love of astronauts smitten enough to leave their post in space (“Watching you chew your mint, the men / forget about their gritty toothpaste”)? To be struck by space itself in the form of a meteorite?
I wouldn’t know. (I do know about shadows as a love story, at least.) But I love that Lewis lingers in the darkness of these lights some of us have wondered about and longed for. She thrusts us into discomfort, like swallowed tadpoles or the regurgitation of a life, and cultivates our empathy and affection with lines like “I’m / the vice president of panic, and the president is / missing.”
My favorite:
SO YOU WANT TO LEAVE PURGATORY
Here, take this knife. Walk down the road until you come across
a red calf in its pasture. It will run toward you with a rope tied
around its neck. Climb over the fence. Hold the rope like a leash.
You haven’t eaten in years. Think— are you being tested? Yes, everything
here is a test. Stop baring teeth upon teeth and leave the calf
to its grazing. Lift your arms toward the sky and receive nothing. Keep
walking and think about the rope around that calf’s neck. Consider
how fast its throat will be choked by its own growing. Walk until you
understand what the knife was for. Now forget it. Here, take this knife.
Finally, a shout-out to Joachim Bandau’s exquisite watercolor cover art....more
So many of these poems sting with the absent weight of unborn children. We're forever discounting language, but imagine the perpetual twining of womanSo many of these poems sting with the absent weight of unborn children. We're forever discounting language, but imagine the perpetual twining of woman and mother in our society, the point at which the relationship is inextricable, and then imagine what it's like not to grow life in that way.
The suffering that ensues is so often silent, unshared because we are so bad at grief in this culture. What happens when someone is brave enough to confess to the babies wanted so badly but never born? Well-meaning awkwardness that stings even more. Because it's not meant to be, and having bodily autonomy is no balm when you want more than anything to be nurturing a person.
Limón documents what it means to grow, to bear another life, in so many ways. The nurturing of a garden. The experience of grief as a thing we carry. Romantic love as a splay-legged foal, ready to run upon birth. (There are many horses in these bluegrass-rich poems. I love them all, but the American Pharaoh shout-out felt particularly special. I waited 35 years for a horse to win the Triple Crown, a life goal over which I had no control, the fruition of which gave me permission to walk away from horse racing and never look back.)
Reading this felt like walking through her garden, gathering word-flowers that make you gasp at their beauty or truth.
I hated the world, the pain of it that circles in us, that makes us want to be the moon, the treasure, and not the thing on the sea floor.
*
Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow. To be the thing not touched by light (no, that's not it)— to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.
Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants, more praise, more hands holding the knives away.
I've been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see beyond my own greed. There's a whole nation of us.
To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.
*
You were standing on the steps, staring out at the sky's ominous openings, a mouth of terrible red, like a tongue that'd been bitten so often it was not a tongue but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak.
*
Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
*
He doesn't answer so maybe I don't exist.
*
...How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say: Don't die.
*
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
*
Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth, if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
*
Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.
*
I can't help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.
*
Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love...more
This collection contains some really strong 15-line poems, but needed significant paring down. I felt drained even before hitting the halfway point. SThis collection contains some really strong 15-line poems, but needed significant paring down. I felt drained even before hitting the halfway point. Still seeking that magical work of poetry that tackles alchemy with success....more
Fierce, meditative, deceptively quiet. Some resonated with me; others, not so much. So three and a half stars. My highlights:
Inishkeel
Think of the une
Fierce, meditative, deceptively quiet. Some resonated with me; others, not so much. So three and a half stars. My highlights:
Inishkeel
Think of the unexpected helpfulness of water —
how it might strand you
on the small shore, here, as if this island were the earth, its own frail sphere of prayer
and obsolescence. There'd be tides and tides of glittering small shells, broken here, like truths, one after the other.
You'd be brevity, yourself barefoot.
You'd turn to salt as if you'd understood the murmur of
the sea as missal. Yes, you might remember
gold or frankincense or myrrh —
you'd settle for the exhaled light of stars.
Anchorage
In Julian's alone unlettered hand love takes the hard ground
dust of oak- gall and the quill, the history of the soul. It breaks
an April into tiny unprotected revelations of its own. It makes bone
flower like blackthorn.
Her Father Walks Over Eggleston Moor
I will take her the sunlight caught in my coat, its smell of wool. I will take her the boat-on-wheels — I daresay Martha will be good enough to mend the smaller sail. I will take her the sound of the sea that has crossed the hills Without its shell.
The Road Home
It is the road to God that matters now, the ragged road, the wood.
And if you will, drop pebbles here and there like Hansel, Gretel, right where
they'll shine in the wilful light of the moon.
You won't be going back to the hut where father, mother plot
the cul de sac of the world in a field
that's permanently full of people
looking for a festival of literature, a fairy tale,
a feathered nest of brothers, sisters. Would
that first world, bared now to the word God, wade
with you, through wood, into the weald and weather of the stars?
Fad Mad, Fairchild, Fearmonger, Flashface. from "Common Plant & Animal Names (Existing & Not Existing)"
Although every title points to a topic that inte
Fad Mad, Fairchild, Fearmonger, Flashface. from "Common Plant & Animal Names (Existing & Not Existing)"
Although every title points to a topic that interests me, although the references to William James and Leonora Carrington provoked mind-grins, although I think "ethereal material" would make a great band name, I am not the right reader for this book. Pagel's disjointed phrasing and fondness for unconventional (for me, uninteresting) spacing and line breaks render the effort required greater than the pay-off. That said, the subject matter is deeply interesting, and occasionally substance transcends style.
Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death is divided into three sections, and each is scattered with excerpts from "The Botched Bestiary," which is concerned more with bodies themselves than specific species: bodies are, after all, common to us all. These were far and away the highlights for me, cobbled together from the words of others ranging from Opal Whiteley (read her diary!) to Henry David Thoreau, from Ray Bradbury to Italo Calvino, from poets to naturalists, if such distinctions make sense. By juxtaposing these disparate texts and tinkering with them slightly, Pagel invites us to look at them askance. She engages my head. But it's harder to feel these poems in my heart. "Storm" struck me, briefly, midway through:
The spoon is too loud for the teacup The eye is too large for the pane But look — look: the narrowing effect of panic on rage A dreadful rumble replacing the nothing that you hear No You need to pay greater attention
Maybe I do. And you may well connect more deeply with these poems than I did. ...more
Angels as a concept do not particularly resonate with me, which may be why a number of these poems failed to take flight in my mind. I don't want diviAngels as a concept do not particularly resonate with me, which may be why a number of these poems failed to take flight in my mind. I don't want divine failsafes, watchful protectors, anthropomorphic saviors, nor gambling tables, nor luck; my hope takes different forms. If I'm to be really honest, my favorite Stephen Dunn poems (here and elsewhere) are about love, messy and unpredictable and utterly human. So here's to the fallen.
EACH FROM DIFFERENT HEIGHTS
That time I thought I was in love and calmly said so was not much different from the time I was truly in love and slept poorly and spoke out loud to the wall and discovered the hidden genius of my hands. And the times I felt less in love, less than someone, were, to be honest, not so different either. Each was ridiculous in its own way and each was tender, yes, sometimes even the false is tender. I am astounded by the various kisses we're capable of. Each from different heights diminished, which is simply the law. And the big bruise from the longer fall looked perfectly white in a few years. That astounded me most of all.
A fortuitous secondhand bookstore find — and I do find it hard to leave New Zealand poets on the shelf. Mostly just does what it says on the box: someA fortuitous secondhand bookstore find — and I do find it hard to leave New Zealand poets on the shelf. Mostly just does what it says on the box: sometimes racy medieval love poems about women and birds and women as birds. Adcock's renderings attempt to remain faithful to the rhythm and rhyme of the Latin originals. I'd class them as adequate with occasional magic. Enjoyed reading, but probably won't read again. The book contains some gorgeous drawings and letterings by Pete Henry, though, so it may remain in my collection....more
That moment when the person you've just met hands you a collection of his poetry, and you think, "It could be quite awkward if he can't actually writeThat moment when the person you've just met hands you a collection of his poetry, and you think, "It could be quite awkward if he can't actually write." And so you wait a night and a day to start reading, and this is how it begins:
Foreshadow
This is how it begins: by banging and shivering the halls in the house at the endocrine block, paths tramped by Uncle Jim and Harry Cat, the moldering barracks out back, mazed with towers standing and towers toppled of ledgers, yearbooks, manuscripts, wholly wrenched and creaking in the wind like a galleon's ribbed timbers, rigged to breathe, rigged to run the hypothermic blues, with Mike clutching our story folder, back of the line, concession stand at the town pool, pale and waterlogged, rivulet-headed leashed by the eyes to Cara Abernathy's one-piece, trying not to grind my teeth in the cold, because this is how it ends: shadows stringbeaning in the afternoon, when defeated was only something I thought I could be.
(Relief. But also of course he can write.)
It's strange to compare one's physical impression of a person to his written persona. I'm lucky enough to count a number of talented poets among my friends, but found myself surprised by what this one was willing to say, autobiographically or otherwise. It's not that these poems lack Tim's economy of movement, of language, because here, as in person, he speaks only when ideas compel him to do so. Sometimes he's wickedly funny and irreverent; at others, he's scraped his language so clean the bone is visible. Sometimes his words cut me just as close:
She's sea glass, tumbled smooth by the waves, worn clean of everything cutting; not shattered, just inchoate, she's sea glass becoming sand.
(from "Sea Glass")
I am not an unbiased reader. But I'm an honest, satisfied one, and I'd recommend Our Lady of Perpetual Motion even if I didn't know its author. I leave you with utter hilarity and a nod to Frost:
Good Fences
Palisades, sharpened pikes with fire-hardened points and high cairned stone, bar entrance to pitchfork mobs and hold the inmates close.
No passing classroom notes, no furtive slipping scraps of paper through interstices, arrowslits and murderholes; fingers twine the chain link like morning glory tendrils.
In river's seething rumble seat bobs a specimen jar of water, inert and sealed to keep my miscible matter from becoming one with everything, wetter and impure, but maybe that lid's screwed tight to keep me from rampaging through your street like a flood, like the Blob, flipping your minivan, fucking your daughter in ways the Blob never could, guzzling all your vodka and scrawling crazy poems on the pages of your books; Thank your starch-collared God that I'm a good neighbor.
Some interesting ekphrastic pieces in here — I love the mental stretch accompanying poems that reframe your understanding of what a poem can be. MorriSome interesting ekphrastic pieces in here — I love the mental stretch accompanying poems that reframe your understanding of what a poem can be. Morrissey writes them mischievously, thoughtfully, skillfully....more
I was going to begin this review with a pointed remark about how tiresome I find conversations about the death of the book, but realized that would reI was going to begin this review with a pointed remark about how tiresome I find conversations about the death of the book, but realized that would require me to engage with those conversations in ways I find extremely tiresome, and the real point here is that Weeds and Wild Flowers is a beautiful book best appreciated in physical form. It's necessary to run your fingers over Jessica Greenman's etchings, though they've been reproduced in this Faber edition using techniques that don't allow you to feel the imprint of the plate on the paper. It's vital to see facing pages simultaneously, to wonder about the juxtaposition of Alice Oswald's poem "Pale Persicaria" with Greenman's "Window."
Some of the etchings replicate or respond directly to the poems, but many of the connections are more oblique. I like this about the book. It begins with explanatory notes from both writer and artist explaining in very different ways how this is really two books in one. Oswald charmingly admits that, although it is not "a reliable guide to wild flowers, [...] it may be a reliable record of someone's wild or wayside selves." Greenman, by contrast, is detailed, practical and specific about her weeds and wildflowers, her process of creation. Mostly it's up to us to explore and ruminate on any commonalities (or divergences) we see threading these linguistic and visual works of art together.
For the past few months I've been reading Oswald's collections of poetry chronologically, my expectations high and mostly met or exceeded. She has a remarkable relationship with words both as signifiers made up of signifiers, symbolic and sibilant, and as sounds that leave our mouths and take on an audible life of their own. There is so much going on in these stylistically diverse (but distinctively Oswaldian) poems that I hesitate to pass any kind of judgment — and I have no idea how many readings, aloud or in the loud silence of my head, would make me feel confident in my impressions of them. I do feel safe saying that, for the most part, I connected more with fragments than entire poems, however vividly those flower-faced people come to life. ("It looks endless. / A silvery bewilderness.""He has enormous jaws, chewing on silence.") I love that she witnesses the primrose's death on April the seventeenth."Violet" is a good example of a poem I don't particularly care for that contains some gobsmackingly beautiful lines:
Finally she mentioned the name of her name
which was something so pin-sharp, in such a last gasp of a previously unknown language,
it could only be spoken as a scent, it could only be heard as our amazement.
When I encounter language like this, I'm taken back to the first time I read James Joyce and felt his joy in words, in life, in love, in the connections between them, and wanted nothing more than to live in those words myself. It's strange to think that Oswald can articulate my weirdly physical response to such beauty with her account of a flower-as-person that never existed but can be found in many places.
Anyway, here is my favorite of the bunch, a softer, meeker poem than many of its companions, but the one that brings spring to my winter, satisfyingly traditional in its rhymes and sentiment:
Snowdrop
A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed, whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl of fine white wool, has suddenly appeared in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall. She may not last. She has no strength at all, but stoops and shakes as if she'd stood all night on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.
One among several hundred clear-eyed ghosts who get up in the cold and blink and turn into these trembling emblems of night frosts, she brings her burnt heart with her in an urn of ashes, which she opens to re-mourn, having no other outlet to express her wild-flower sense of wounded gentleness.
Yes, she's no more now than a drop of snow on a green stem — her name is now her calling. Her mind is just a frozen melting glow of water swollen to the point of falling, which maybe has no meaning. There's no telling. But what a beauty, what a mighty power of patience kept intact is now in flower.
Confession: I'm a fussy poetry reader, preferring collected poems to their selected counterparts. My theory is that if they're good I'd rather read a Confession: I'm a fussy poetry reader, preferring collected poems to their selected counterparts. My theory is that if they're good I'd rather read a bunch of them than a cherry-picked few before moving on to another handful carefully selected by someone whose taste may be very different from mine. This selection, though, begins stunningly with the eponymous piece from 1984's Jacklight, and then "The Woods." Erdrich beckons to us from within their depths, her eyes flashing:
At one time your touches were clothing enough. Within these trees now I am different. Now I wear the woods.
I lower a headdress of bent sticks and secure it. I strap to myself a breastplate of clawed, roped bark. I fit the broad leaves of sugar maples to my hands, like mittens of blood.
Now when I say come, and you enter the woods, hunting some creature like the woman I was, I surround you.
Light bleeds from the clearing. Roots rise. Fluted molds burn blue in the falling light, and you also know the loneliness that you taught me with your body.
When you lie down in the grave of a slashed tree, I cover you, as I always did. Only this time you do not leave.
These are powerful, haunting poems, inhabiting and inhabited by nature: less articulate than fiercely articulated, forceful. "The Strange People," which takes the inscrutable dark-eyed gaze of antelopes as its subject, staggered me with this deft transition:
All day, asleep in clean grasses, I dream of the one who could really wound me. Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look. Not even with his goodness.
If I man was never to lie to me. Never lie me. I swear I would never leave him.
But it's hard when the high points appear early, raising expectations that wait page after page for fulfillment. Long stretches of Original Fire failed to ignite in my mind, something soft and porous mistaken for flint. The Potchikoo stories made me smile and occasionally wince, but didn't stick. By contrast, "The Butcher's Wife," another segment from Baptism of Desire, grabbed hold of my attention immediately and continued to hold it with strong imagery, unexpected twists and connections:
But something queer happens when the heart is delivered. When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger. You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.
[...]
Butch once remarked there was no one so deft as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.
How we cling to the bones.
Something about "The Carmelites," from this sequence, both delights and frightens me. Perhaps it's the distance between us.
I've thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night, scarred like the moon in her observance, shaved and bound and bandaged in rough blankets like a poor mare's carcass, muttering for courage at the very hour cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto turns to me with urgency and power. Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes, and the buried structure shows, the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs, freeze to acid in the strange heart.
I last read Erdrich as a teenager and am struck by the kinship between her novels and these storytelling poems. It seems to me she is at her best when the words seem to flood out of her, a kind of predestined presentiment: she and they share a conviction in their truth, their rightness. There's a beauty to her language that belies her language (see "Advice to Myself") and I wish the whole book felt like this. But it is, after all, a selection, and a pretty good one at that, because it introduced me to "Clouds." I can't resist closing with the second half of this exquisite, meandering, drunken poem.
What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these? With a headful of spirits, how else can I think? Under so many clouds, such hooded and broken old things. They go on simply folding, unfolding, like sheets hung to dry and forgotten.
And no matter how careful I watch them, they take a new shape, escaping my concentrations, they slip and disperse and extinguish themselves.
They melt before I half unfathom their forms. Just as fast, a few bones disconnecting beneath us. It is too late, I fear, to call these things back. Not in this language. Not in this life.
I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce. But these clouds, creeping toward us each night while the milk gets scorched in the pan, great soaked loaves of bread are squandering themselves in the west.
Look at them: Proud, unpausing. Open and growing, we cannot destroy them or stop them from moving down each avenue, the dogs turn on their chains, children feel through the windows. What else should we feel our way through —
We lay our streets over the deepest cries of the earth and wonder why everything comes down to this: The days pile and pile. The bones are too few and too foreign to know. Mary, you do not belong here at all.
Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town. Let everything be how it could have been, once: a land that was empty and perfect as clouds. But this is the way people are. All that appears to us empty, We fill. What is endless and simple, We carve, and initial, and narrow roads plow through the last of the hills where our gravestones rear small black vigilant domes. Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars deep in this strange earth we want to call ours.
Marly Youmans's Thaliad is the second work of epic poetry I've read this year. (The first was Amy Brown's The Odour of Sanctity, for which I have not Marly Youmans's Thaliad is the second work of epic poetry I've read this year. (The first was Amy Brown's The Odour of Sanctity, for which I have not yet found words but hope you will read.)
It's a form I tend to approach with some trepidation, magisterial but a little aloof, confident in its pacing and path regardless of whether or not I follow. And yet the epic relies on its audience, counts on our reactions; these poems lead with head tilted to the side, watching those who follow with side-swept glances. Most of the time they see me getting caught up in the events to the exclusion of the emotion involved, getting frustrated, getting a bit... bored.
I really do like Homer. There is something magical about the linguistic structure and musicality of ancient Greek — all those intuitive accents, all those letters and words we're not really sure how to pronounce. The names! The lists! The violence! Well, not so much the violence. But classic heroic epics like The Odyssey and The Iliad have infiltrated our culture and minds in strange ways. I'm not sure how many accounts of Odysseus's long journey home to Ithaca I've read or seen or heard, but they've all contributed to how I think about him — even the video we made during freshman year of high school juxtaposing that lone cycloptic eye with the fortuitously full moon on the night of filming. Maybe this is what I'm trying to say: much of the emotion I've invested in Penelope and Telemachus and Argos derives from my own personal history with the narrative.
By contrast, Youmans's Thaliad presents an unfamiliar-recognizable epic, marrying our penchant for not-long-from-now post-apocalypticism with the old-to-the-point-of-timelessness. She tells us how the world ends and how it begins again. Our heroes are children, our narrator a bard charged with preserving remnants of the end and commemorating the beginning. She gives us accidental glimpses of herself, her fears, her hopes, her faith. She gives us love and she gives us a sense of horror.
You see, Emma, our narrator, counts — she counts down. And these are eleven-year-olds. They get older — we've grown older, however young we still feel — but we read their youth in these pages, and it breaks hearts. Meet Gabriel:
He huddled on the pavement, sunk in tears, And only jumped up, pleading at the glass, When laughing faces looked from high on him. I'd like to say that they relented then, Embraced the boy and let him in to stay, One cruel lesson roughly taught and learned: Events went otherwise. They drove away.
They drove away! And left that little boy Alone with bridges, river, blowing ash, Immensity. He was eleven, a child Beloved and seldom left alone in rooms. The landscape must have wallowed round his head, Wavering, frightful-strange, making its threats In symbol language of a mighty sky That promised death, destruction, reign of fire; In symbol language of the puissant stream That had been thicked and porridged by the ash...
I hadn't anticipated the depth of feeling this early passage provoked, nor the way that emotion shifted and swelled over the course of the Thaliad's twenty-four short sections. This is all to say that I'm grateful to Gabriel, to the twins, Alexandra and Elaine, to Fay, to Samuel and Ran, to Thalia, smallest of them all, to Emma, who carries the weight of the past in words, and to Youmans, who forced me to reassess how epic poems might make me — and you, and everyone else bothering to listen — feel. And for making me want to read more. It's the perfect way to end a year of reading....more
This is an extraordinary meditation on... well, desire. Love, lust, longing, the complications that accompany that which we cannot control or change. This is an extraordinary meditation on... well, desire. Love, lust, longing, the complications that accompany that which we cannot control or change. Love of love as much as love of the beloved. The desire to want something else, to be someone else. After reading the first half of the book, I described Bidart's work to a friend as sparse and powerful. He uses the spaces between words, the ideas connecting and inhabiting them, deftly, building and repeating in an almost musical way.
"The Return," a poem about war and populated with dead soldiers unsaveable for centuries, affected me deeply. I keep returning to these terrible, beautiful lines:
Fragments of spears and horses' limbs lay intertwined, while human
skulls were nailed
like insults to the tree-trunks.
And then I read the second half in one long, gasping gulp. With a single poem Bidart turns the concept of desire back on itself and makes the story of Myrrha's betrayed, bewildered love painfully vivid. He makes it true. I won't feed you a tantalizing snippet, however tempting it is to share this piece, because it must be read in full. Hie thee to your library or local bookshop and let Frank Bidart devour your heart....more
I discovered Dorothea Lasky during the difficult second quarter of 2012. Reading one poem in particular felt a bit like that cold, hard pit of dread aI discovered Dorothea Lasky during the difficult second quarter of 2012. Reading one poem in particular felt a bit like that cold, hard pit of dread at the sight of an accident in the distance, only when I approached it was my own body broken, my own blood imprinted on the asphalt. It's called "Poem to an Unnameable Man."
Like that extraordinary, powerful poem, the pieces in Thunderbird shudder and shake with barely contained emotion. But whereas the former left me, too, shaking with recognition — "A graceful lady that is part museum / Of the voices of the universe everyone else forgets" — many of these poems blew past me as I shook my head sadly: not really my thing. Too many split infinitives. Too few complete sentences. Deepish Philosophy 101 thoughts interpreting puddles as pools, and vice versa.
Reading this collection feels a bit like attempting falconry without any training. Suddenly there is a fierce, feral bird piercing your wrist through the leather of the gauntlet, and though you gaze into those piercing eyes with confidence, you will never bend them to your will. This creature refuses to be guided or contained, will barely deign to acknowledge the laws of nature, let alone obey them. Yes, there is power here in these words, sharp cries from a voice that will never confuse truth for beauty.
These are Lasky's laws:
And what I say are feelings Are also not feelings And what I say are old hurts Are new hurts And what deceit And what deceit makes a moon go negative And what black hole Is the opposite of a rock I only have you and me I only have this hand to hold you with
And if I am an empty space And if I am a truly empty space Then my open hand is empty too Then my heart a wide and open plain Then my brain a dense infinity
A dense infinity of nothing That holds no power And if I hold no power Then what ugliness could I truly hold To make you so mad at me
To make you so cruel And to extend that cruelty elsewhere And if paper and bone make up light And if animal fur makes up the night And if light and earth are nothing
Then what is this light that shows my face? Then, truly I would rather shroud it in darkness Then I would rather it always be dark Then I would rather my open hand be night
For what love is useful In this cold dark light And what fire extends in this cold dark light And what cruelty I will too create In the cold dark night
The simplicity works for me here; the poem containing this extract, "Ugly Feelings," is rugged, raw, deeply and desperately felt, Lasky maintaining an uneasy balance between her instincts to record or simply fly. I wish there were more moments like this in Thunderbird, but that they appear at all in its pages seems a gift....more
On that April afternoon, I quietly chose a seat in the middle of the auditorium at City Gallery Wellington and waited. I'm a fiddler, alternating betwOn that April afternoon, I quietly chose a seat in the middle of the auditorium at City Gallery Wellington and waited. I'm a fiddler, alternating between the Kindle app on my iPod and half-hearted attempts to find an open wireless network, a leg-twitcher, a cautious observer. One of my favorite writers sat down beside me with her husband; other book-jacket-familiar faces appeared, smiling at one another and filling up the room.
To be honest, I had only read a few of Mary Ruefle's poems before deciding to make the trek into town for her Writers on Mondays session. Best decision of the year? She's as engaging a reader as she is a writer, wry, funny, full of conviction and secrets she gives you the sense she's revealed just for you, the audience so swiftly won over. Yep, that was me: googling "Saga" as soon as I got home. It was the first piece she read, the first piece I fell for. And, with Trances of the Blast, it's finally in print:
Everything that ever happened to me is just hanging — crushed and sparkling — in the air, waiting to happen to you. Everything that ever happened to me happened to somebody else first. I would give you an example but they are all invisible. Or off gallivanting around the globe. Not here when I need them now that I need them if I ever did which I doubt. Being particular has its problems. In particular there is a rift through everything. There is a rift running the length of Iceland and so a rift runs through every family and between families a feud. It's called a saga. Rifts and sagas fill the air, and beautiful old women sing of them, so the air is filled with music and the smell of berries and apples and shouting when a gun goes off and crying in closed rooms. Faces, who needs them? Eating the blood of oranges I in my alcove could use one. Abbas and ammas! come out of your huts, travel halfway around the world, inspect my secret bank account of joy! My face is a jar of honey you can look through, you can see everything is muted, so terribly muted, who could ever speak of it, sealed and held up for all?
This is how Ruefle opens her newest collection: confessional and conversational, elliptic without being cryptic, wise and elemental. These trances read a bit like a far-flung jigsaw of a map piecing together the author's exploded memory palace and surrounding gardens and caves. (We all have caves, yeah? Ha ha, "Platonic.") I love that I can time travel back to April and hear her voice when I read "Goodnight Irene" and "Provenance." The watchwords here are time, loneliness, happiness, the themes memories of childhood and family, the relationships between writing and language, writer and audience. The effect is utterly charming and compelling, scratching that sweet readerly spot where head and heart meet.
The first half strikes me as stronger. Ruefle gives us "Spikenard" and "Are We Alone? Is It Safe to Speak?" She dreams of Wilhelm Müller, "Receiving News of the Devastation of My Mind" and her "Favorite Song." She delights and appeases with "Apologia," and "One World at a Time" brings to mind the opening of Rose Macaulay's wonderful The Towers of Trebizond. Mostly she shares little bits of perfection, as in this unexpectedly Brautigan-esque snippet:
Argot
The moon passes her twentieth night. Month after month, she dies so young. What are the trout thinking? At dawn on the thirteenth I am lost in the great expanse of tiny thoughts. When I say trout I mean you.
But the second half is no slouch, either. "Poem Written Before I Was Born" is performance art waiting to happen at a future reading. I can't even talk about the wistful wonder of "Pipkins of the Mimulus." I'm flipping through the pages again and getting caught up in patterns I missed the first time around, at once happy and, well, lonely, or simply satisfied with solitude as I lose myself in Ruefle's words. See, here's the conclusion of "Jumping Ahead," with its double-dog-daring, heart-stopping speculation and confrontation:
If only I'd invented salt. I might have died happy. I wish I loved you, but you can't have everything. I ought to have had bizarre erroneous beliefs. If only I'd had gigantic forelegs attached to my legs I'd have leapt off the edge every time I came to the edge of you.
(And comfort. I find this one weirdly reassuring. Ditto for "Broken Spoke.")
This review is hopelessly biased, this book one of my favorites of the year. The part of me that remembers and believes that "there are things more important / than life or death" wants time to pass quickly so that I can look forward to reading it from a new perspective, and to read more new poems from Ruefle. A little bit mad, a lot true, like "Picking Up Pinecones":
I light a few candles, so the moon is no longer alone. My secret heart wakes inside its draped cage and cracks a song. After a life of imagining, I notice the ceiling. It is painted blue with a border of pinecones. I've spent my life in a forest. Picking up new things, will it never end?
Rachel O'Neill's prose poems appraise you with knowing eyes, arms crossed, formidable but friendly. I tend to favor more lyrical, naturalistic poetry,Rachel O'Neill's prose poems appraise you with knowing eyes, arms crossed, formidable but friendly. I tend to favor more lyrical, naturalistic poetry, but couldn't resist the best among this three-part debut collection. Take the eponymous piece:
I let ghosts tag along. Like snow drifts, they ruin the carpet, the children — all things I find it hard to talk about. It hurts, as hurt makes transparent my extra toe, my knives and oaths, my mania for Neanderthals, my fake identification, my spare antithesis, my deliberate vastness, my blunt instruments, my sad empty tomato tins, my winds of miniature anchors drifting on the skin, my aches with their faces, my way of leaving memory, a shoe at the entrance, my lurches inside wisdom, my salty compasses, my throaty lozenges, my seductive logic, my wolfish promises, my leaps and bounds, my promenades, my Christmas lights, my jogging shoes, my wet areas, my inner hoot of owls.
All those things we try to hide: O'Neill plucks them unflinchingly from her grab bag of secrets and speaks without affect, without interpretation. Here they are, she says — here I am — and we love her for her courage, her quirks, her sly sleight of hand because honesty can only tell us so much. No surprise, then, that my other highlight is "Homecoming":
He writes to her while he is away so she knows about the Sphinx and pyramids, and behind it all she sees that the horizon is impermanence itself — a cool line of mouth, cave, or fire. What he doesn't say in his letters he describes in his secret notebook — what it's like to fly for hours in a hell of moonlight. In his small handwriting he mentions aging ten years in one night. But he doesn't say anything about starting to sweat out his old life — so thorough a desertion he thinks that it is blood. At the end of 1942 he returns home by ship. At first he walks up Queen Street, then he runs. He comes to the backdoor to find his mother just finishing up the breakfast dishes.
What we share. What we won't. What we can't. I'm so glad Rachel O'Neill has given us One Human in Height, and look forward to reading more of her words in the future; I'm so proud to have helped make this book a reality by backing it on Pledge Me. Support your local artists, folks — magic is happening in plain sight if only you'll look....more
May two fields be bridged by a stile And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance
Thanks to a friend's research interests, I'm now keenly aw
May two fields be bridged by a stile And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance
Thanks to a friend's research interests, I'm now keenly aware of the distinctions we draw between the human and non-human, and the subtle to straightforward ways we go about privileging the former in conversation as well as action. So, while Woods etc. may not have moved me as much as I had hoped or expected, while it may have seemed a bit more erratic than Oswald's earlier work, this collection is also a deeply interesting, thought-provoking read.
may we come to know that the length of water is not quite the same as the passing of time
I tend to think of poetry as an exercise in humanity — one that travels a very individual path but resonates with shared human insight and experience. What fascinates me about Oswald is how thoroughly, how joyously, she inhabits the non-human, which turns out to be unexpectedly (is it so startling, though?) humane. In "Five Fables of a Length of Flesh," for instance, she moves from the body of a man to a ferret, a frog, an ass, a sheep, changing gender, changing form, changing voice — and yet not changing, not so much that she becomes unrecognizable. Here she simply makes her habitation of other minds and bodies more explicit, more explicitly beautiful. She draws the familiar out of the foreign, and it's magic.
Woods etc. contains many highlights: lyrics, lines, luminous turns of phrase, ideas that pierce and beckon. Entire poems, entire worlds. "Walking Past a Rose this June Morning," "Story of a Man," "A Star Here and a Star There." My favorite is a list. How strange. How perfect.
Various Portents
Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers. Much cold, much overbearing darkness.
Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.
More than one North Star, more than one South Star. Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems, Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thicknesses of Dark, Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.
Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens, All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes: Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk, Works of wonder and/or water, snowflakes, stars of frost...
Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes, Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness, Various 5,000-year-old moon maps, Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in braille.
Various gods making beautiful works in bronze, Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains, And all sorts of drystone stars put together without mortar. Many Wisemen remarking the irregular weather.
Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers, Watchers of wisps of various glowing spindles, Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac, Seafarers tossing, tied to a star...
Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights. Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall. Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.
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