Margaret Gibson: Not Hearing the Wood Thrush

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NOT HEARING THE WOOD THRUSH, Margaret Gibson. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2018, 80 pages, $18.95 paper, https://lsupress.org.

Today I have about a million things to do, but I’m glad the day began with this book. It was like having an hour of quietude, a meditative retreat from busy-ness. Rather than engaging with a world of objects—as so many poets do so well—these poems come at life from a different place, creating almost another world. It’s been a while since I read her Broken Cup, but I believe this book differs even from Gibson’s own earlier work. I like the way the LSU site describes it:

“I look about and find whatever I see / unfinished,” Margaret Gibson writes in these powerful and moving poems, which investigate a late-life genesis. Not Hearing the Wood Thrush grapples with the existential questions that come after experiencing a great personal loss. A number of poems meditate on loneliness and fear; others speak to “No one”—a name richer than prayer or vow.” In this transformative new collection [her thirteenth book], Gibson moves inward, taking surprising, mercurial turns of the imagination, guided by an original and probative intelligence. With a clear eye and an open heart, Gibson writes, “How stark it is to be alive”—and also how glorious, how curious, how intimate.

So, before I rush off (again) to my errands, here is one poem.

The Cry

No longer any wish to give a name
to the one vine
that unfurls its many blooms
continually beside the door,
and whose tendrils
brush lightly at my sleeves,
coming and going. Sorrow daily
changes to wonder, and a cry—
windswept, and yet
particular as the click of a stone
footfall dislodges—
moves throughout space and time.
No hinge or heart-latch to it.
Unsought, it comes to you.
Unbinds and scours.
A residue of all that has been stored
as if in large clay jars
in the inner sanctum of a tomb. And it is
entirely and only what you are. A cry.

—Margaret Gibson

This is a gorgeous poem to read aloud, or for the “mouthfeel,” as some say. I love the line, “No hinge or heart-latch,” and the cascading sounds of “Unsought, unbinds, scours, residue, stored” that fall on the more solid syllables of “large clay jars.”

To learn more about Gibson, visit her webpage.

Barbara Crooker, The Book of Kells

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THE BOOK OF KELLS, Barbara Crooker. The Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books, An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401, 2019, 88 pages, $12.00 paper, www.wipfandstock.com.

I’ve been saving this book for Easter Sunday. Barbara Crooker wrote these poems, her eighth full-length collection, in Ireland while on a writing fellowship at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, County Monaghan. Her meditations on the Book of Kells, and other aspects of her sojourn, made me want to meditate on her poems. Like this one (note: the r and v refer to recto and verso, right and left, pages of the manuscript):

Interlinear

Let’s praise the agile little animals
that flit here and there in the Vulgate text,
who can wedge in small spaces: the moth
in initial P, antenna flickering outside the line.
Or the monk on his horse, trotting right off the page.
Look, there’s an otter, his mouth full of fish, and here,
a blue cat sits watchfully by. A gorgeous green lizard
slithers in the text, 72r, while a wolf pads his way
through 76v. It’s a whole barnyard: chickens and mice,
hounds and hares, snakes, eagles, and stags. Animals
as decoration. Animals as punctuation. Things seen
and unseen. So let us praise all of God’s creatures,
including the small and the inconsequential, all of us,
interlinear, part of the larger design.

—Barbara Crooker

This is a physically beautiful book, bought (again) on impulse, just because it was so lovely. But inside the covers, too, such beauty! “Somehow Barbara Crooker has fastened it all to the page here: the sweet green world of Ireland, with its glorious book of Kells, its age-old humor, its inimitable music, its poets with their delicious bendy language, so that you can almost taste those buttery scones and its peat-laced Irish whiskey” (Paul Mariani, back cover).

I wish I could buy copies for all of my friends. I wish I could write such a book. Part, as I said, meditation, part travelogue.  “For the monks, the very shape of the letters / were magical, this graceful insular majuscule” (“The Alphabet”). Then the poems drawing from Yeats and Heaney and other Irish poets. And the poems—more familiar to fans of Crooker—of domestic bliss: “drinking tea in a blue-patterned mug / while rain mutters and spatters / the flagstones” (“Almost”).

You will have to get your own copy, but here’s one more poem. It’s set in October (the month I visited Ireland in 2017), but makes a perfect poem for Easter.

Small Prayer

Ireland, late October, and first frost settles on the lawn.
Yesterday, the gardener on his tractor mowed
in concentric circles, a Celtic knot at the center
of his design. Now in the grooves, ice crystals
set off the pattern, illuminate it as surely
as monks in their cells. Up from the lake,
a fairy mist rises, and whooper swans bugle up
the dawn, which flushes the clouds pink and gold.
On this new day, may I walk out singing, open
to what’s never happened before. Let me be grateful.
Let me pay attention. And then when evening
closes the shutters, may I sail through the night
on the back of a swan.

—Barbara Crooker

This past Friday evening I attended a Zoom event with Enlighten Kitsap featuring Holly J. Hughes. It was a great introduction to inspirational poetry—and how we need poetry in hard times. She read a number of poems, including one by Barbara Crooker (and one by me!). I highly recommend it. The video should be posted in a few days: http://www.enlightenkitsap.org/?page_id=13

And for today, may you “walk out singing, open / to what’s never happened before.”

https://www.tcd.ie/visitors/stunning-easter-symbolism-in-the-book-of-kells/

Ursula K. Le Guin, So Far So Good

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SO FAR SO GOOD: FINAL POEMS: 2014-2018, Ursula K. Le Guin. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368, 2018, 89 pages, $23 hardback, https://www.coppercanyonpress.org

I was standing in front of the poetry shelf in Edmonds Bookshop, planning to pick up a book by Jericho Brown or Ada Limón, when this little treasure caught my eye. Hardback, brand new. Not too long after Le Guin’s death in 2018.

How It Seems to Me

In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

The poems here are elegiac, but also playful (“Judging beauty, which is keenest, / Eye or heart or mind or penis?”). They draw from Le Guin’s childhood, and lean into science and natural history. A sequence of 12 poems are built on the final voyage of Lt. William Bligh—or, not “the subject,” but “the metaphor” (“this little boat my body / its ragged sail my soul”).

As a wannabe novelist, this poem especially appealed to me:

The Old Novelist’s Lament

I miss the many that I was,
my lovers, my adventurers,
the women I went with to the Pole.
What was mine and what was theirs?
We were all rich. Now that I share
the cowardice of poverty,
I miss that courage of companionship.
I wish they might come back to me
and free me from this cell of self,
this stale sink of age and ills,
and take me on the ways they knew,
under the sky, across the hills.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Did Le Guin know this would be her last book? Maybe my knowing was enough. But Le Guin does seem to be letting go, or taking hold of something else, something larger: “I am such a long way from my ancestors now / in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them / than their descendent” (from “Ancestry”).

I bought the other books, too, by the way. But this one is such a lovely artifact. There’s no end of praise—and awards—that I could list here. You can read more at https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/ursula-k-le-guin/ and https://www.ursulakleguin.com/home/.

By the way—should you miss it on the home page, I am reading with four other Northwest poets on April 21, 6-7 p..m, on Zoom, hosted by Edmonds Bookshop and Rose Alley Press. Navigate to https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/annual-poetry-night-virtual-again-year to find out more.

SETH, A Black Odyssey

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A BLACK ODYSSEY: COLLECTED POEMS, SETH. Mercury HeartLink, Albuquerque, NM, 2012, 108 pages, $15 paper, www.heartlink.com.

Gregory Seth Harris, the poet better known as SETH, has been attending the Chuckanut Sandstone Writers Theatre on

Cover art by Rein Whitt-Pritchette

Zoom for the last several months. He is now here in person, having trekked to the Pacific Northwest from Denver, Colorado, where he is a well known performance artist. I had the privilege of driving him to west Seattle’s C & P Coffee Company Wednesday evening for Poetry Bridge and a book-launch with featured reader and local poetry raconteur, Paul E. Nelson (more about him in a later post). We then took part in their first in-person “community mike”  in two years.

On Friday evening, April 15, he is the featured reader at Book Tree in Kirkland. (Click on the link to learn more.)

On April 23 he is giving a workshop on performance in Bellingham. (See the poster below.)

On the back cover, David J. Rothman calls SETH “a force of nature.” Art Goodtimes: “always an experimenter willing to push the cultural boundaries, happy to take the Apollonian crowd on tour…”  “Homer would clap,” is how Rosemary Wahtola Trommer chooses to begin her cover blurb, but so, I think, would Whitman. These poems are raucous with imagery and a wild, sometimes shocking, always entertaining excess. In the Acknowledgments, SETH explains the ordering of the book:

I have a reputation for taking risks. Truth is, I just don’t know any better. Ostensibly, this collection is my attempt to cram 30 years of poetry into one volume. Not wishing to publish them in chronological order, group them according to time period or by style and content, I opted to arrange them according to my favorite epic tale. Why not? Odysseus is my favorite literary hero. Many of my poems reference some aspect of his journey. Plus, his trials and triumphs have often served as a beacon to several of my own struggles, lighting a clear path during periods of uncertainty. (ix)

In the first poem, “A Poet Petitions His Muse,” that epic journey launches — almost “everyman” (or “every writer”) but with an insistence on this poet, specifically: “that blank page / a smooth flat placid white man / of a face / glowering up at me / eyes narrowed, mouth clamped shut / black dash / thin as an eyelash.”

From the section titled “A Gathering of Shades”:

Sometimes Up

Sometimes up is underground
On a subterranean verandah; new sound
Percolating new language; half mantra, half howl
When iambic pentameter has reached its limit
And a bloody continent eclipses the spastic sky
Where the sun wears false eyelashes
And every dandelion becomes a critic
When Humpty Dumpty is tumblin’ down
Sometimes up is underground

So when the heart’s voltage assumes fetal position
And the flies in your mustard crack a wan smile
Consult the long-haired spiders chewing cobwebs
Dance with roaches, chat with Frankenstein
Don’t let that cat in your tree fade with a frown
Get your soggy soul down under
Cause sometimes up is underground.

— SETH

You can learn more at https://www.wagingart.com.