Brenda Miller, The Daughters of Elderly Women

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THE DAUGHTERS OF ELDERLY WOMEN, Brenda Miller. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, $205, Seattle WA 98105, 2020, 41 pages, $10, paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

Not only are these poems I wish I had written, but they are poems I should have written. It’s a meditative, almost spiritual collection, but busy, too—like a care-taking daughter—with minutiae. Doctor appointments, dust, hospital rooms, post-it notes nudging a failing memory, loss.

I knew of Brenda Miller because of her brilliant essays, and her book on writing, co-written with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World (Skinner House Press, 2012). She teaches at Western Washington University and is the author of several books of essays. An Earlier Life won the 2017 Washington State Book Award.

The Daughters of Elderly Women won the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. And even though it took me on a trip down the rabbit-hole of memory, I read it hungrily. I lapped it up. These poems (several of them titled “The Daughters of Elderly Women”) made me remember that I, too, was a member of this strange tribe. I am happy to recommend it to you.

The Daughters of Elderly Women

are planning ahead.

They print it all out:
Advanced Directive, Power
of Attorney, Last Will and Testament.

In hospital rooms,
at the edges of beds,
they hold a neon form

in their palms
as if it were an oracle—
Physician’s Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment,

beneficent and dangerous
all at once. POLST—almost
pulse, what we look for—

faint throb, Morse code of the heart.

If the body
wants to go, watch it go.

They use the simplest words
possible. They say
it’s up to you

knowing nothing is up to us,
that the body does what it does,

fierce flesh that keeps living

no matter the circumstance.
They explain how CPR damages:
crushed ribs, deprived brain.

The daughters remind
their mothers about the fathers,

the ones who had heart attacks, ended
up in nursing homes, so frail
they couldn’t turn over in bed.

The daughters try not to speak
so fast, words a scatter
of birdshot that dissipates

before reaching the target.

That’s not what you’d want, right?
the daughters say, looking their mothers
in the eye, voices soft
as they’ll ever be.

—Brenda Miller

To learn more about Brenda Miller, visit her website. I found several essays on-line, including this one, “The Blessing of the Animals” (a favorite of mine) at The Sun. If you want to purchase the book, you can find it (perhaps on sale) at Floating Bridge Press.

 

Arthur Sze, Sight Lines

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SIGHT LINES, Arthur Sze. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368, 2019, 70 pages, $16 paper, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Today I started a couple different poetry books and for some reason—I don’t blame the poets—couldn’t get any traction. Then I stumbled across this one, sat down, and read it all the way through. Arthur Sze has long been one of my favorite poets, and Sight Lines is a book I already knew well. I’ve studied the poems and shared them with my writing group. But reading the whole book, all in one go, was a very different experience. (I recommend both approaches.)

Sight Lines is Sze’s 10th book of poetry and it won the National Book Award. The Copper Canyon editors call it “prismatic,” and “stunning.” They’re not wrong. I love the way Sze both eulogizes our crippled planet and celebrates its images. The nest of a spotted towhee, Norway maples, cedar trees, deer, lichen, wild irises. Nothing escapes notice: “a fern rises out // of the crotch of an ‘õhi’a tree and droplets have collected  / on a mule’s foot fern” (“In the Bronx”). Everywhere nature’s fragility is both itself and a reminder—singing to us—of our own fragility: “…only look yes look at me now because you are blink  / about to leave” (“Lichen Song”).

Here’s a poem from a dog-eared page:

Xeriscape

When she hands you a whale vertabra,
you marvel at its heft, at a black

pebble lodged in a lateral nook;
the hollyhocks out the window

stretch into sunshine; a dictionary
in the room is open to xeriscape;

the sidewalk and gravel heat all day
and release warmth into the night;

the woman who sits and writes
sees pressed aspen board, framers

setting window headers and door-
jambs—here no polar bears rummage

at the city dump, no seal-oil lamps
flicker in the tide of darkness—

you know the influx of afternoon
clouds, thunder, ball lightning,

wavering lines of rain that evaporate
before they strike the ground,

as you carefully set the whale bone
on the glass table next to the television.

—Arthur Sze

To read more about Arthur Sze and Sight Lines, visit his page at Copper Canyon. At Poetry Foundation I learned that he has a new book,  The Glass Constellation: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) which I will need to get my hands on.

Laura Read, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL, Laura Read. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Pa 15260, 2012, 104 pages, $17 paper, https://upittpress.org.

The intimacy of this book of poems is searing. A father dies, a mother remarries. A child is uprooted. (And so much more.) Then life goes on. A life in three parts. Swoon-worthy writing here, and poems I wish I’d written.

Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral won the coveted AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and there is so much I could say about it. And should. But I am battling a headache today, so I’m sending you to Read’s page at U Pitt Press to read the back cover praise for yourself.

Here is one of many splendid examples, the title poem:

Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

She doesn’t want me to go back
to Long Island—I won’t find
Carle Place High School
or the house with the four rooms
where her cousin Billy used to bang
on the door until her mother
let him in, slid a fat chop on a dinner plate
and kept him
safe from the house down the block,
his father in the garage.
Carle Place’s mascot was a frog
and my mother was the captain
of the Green Team the year they won
Sports Night and her father, the school
custodian who lived in the pipes
and the closet of brooms,
came running over the polished planks
of the gymnasium floor and picked her up.
Outside, the real frogs sang their deep
songs as if they knew about my mother
and how she was leaving.
If I go back, I won’t find her—
they took the town down
like the Heath Library
across the street from St. Aloysius
where I read the World Book Encyclopedia
for my ornithology report—
I had to tell the story of 30 birds,
where they lived, what they ate,
how you can spot them up in the branches
and tell them one from the other.
I had to color each feather on their breasts.
Their hearts were beating
underneath the paper.
My mother said that’s where
they keep their songs but don’t press
your ear there to listen.
Don’t watch to see if they’ll lift
off the page—they want to open
their thin wings you made for them
with their pencils
and see how they do in the wind.

—Laura Read

Visit Pictures of Poets, too. At Read’s personal website I learned that she is the Poet Laureate of Spokane, and that she has a new(er) book, and much more.

Ann Spiers, Back Cut

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BACK CUT, Ann Spiers. Black Heron Press, PO Box 614, Anacortes, WA 98221, 2021, 88 pages, $16 paper, www.blackheronpress.com.

I had dropped by Edmonds Bookshop to quickly pick up Sharon Hashimoto’s book of poems, when this slim volume (too) caught my eye. The cover is black, but has darker blocks set into the background. The title, in white letters, is partly cut away.

On the back cover, testimonials from poets we’ve already heard from this month: Kevin Miller (“a love story weathered and brined in the wilds of the Washington coast”); Sharon Hashimoto (“mastery of such unspoken, yet tender emotions”). Inside, more testimonials. And the poet’s introduction:

In felling a tree, the initial deep undercut is wedge shaped. This cut determines the direction of the fall. Opposite and higher than the initial cut is the back cut, the first of the felling cuts. The labor varies with tree, axe or saw, and with the crew’s strength and smarts.

Having grown up not far from the wild Washington coast, I found familiar voices in this cycle of love poems. The husband and wife (whose voices alternate) scrape a living from the shore and the trees. They escape fires. The wife plays piano. The husband—a veteran of WWII—drinks. They make a life.

It’s difficult to excerpt this book (you sort of have to read the whole thing). But here’s a sample:

Husband—
Putting Up For Winter

The glut
we net smelt out
of the wave’s long running
eagles snag silver scattering
crazy

salmon
so plentiful
their splishes racket up
stream    bear smell hot at every
trail turn

so thick
huckleberry
milked from the stem plunk plunk
in our buckets     fresh scat purple
with fruit

so much
we cannot stop
bigger loads just one more
woodstove glowing into the night
horse clams

—Ann Spiers

Some of poems are in numbered parts. All are spare, no punctuation, no ands or buts — all those little “stage directions” such as yet, then, next, “I thought,” and so on that I find in my poems — anything unnecessary stripped away, life itself, stark, shining. The subject matter reminded me of my family, and these voices, hard-bitten, “briny,” took me back. I came away from it wanting to write, which is one of the reasons I value doing all this reading of poetry books every April.

Ann Spiers is poet laureate of Vashon Island, has several art-chapbooks, and teaches poetry writing. You can learn more about her (and you should!) at http://annspiers.com.