Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion

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Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) was a true gift to poetry. I attended her SAL lecture in 2015, and bought this book — Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), and of course I brought it home and tucked it onto a shelf, in a prominent location, and didn’t read it. I’m so happy that it was waiting for me, patiently and without judgment, ready to be opened, offering its magic.

As with several other poets this month, I had to — I wanted to — read Brock-Broido’s poems over and over. She values image and sound, and she choreographs her poems across the pages. I won’t say they are puzzles, but they are gems. They’re like beautifully wrought Matroushka dolls, meanings tucked within meanings.

“I am of a fine mind to worship the visible world, the woo and pitch and sign of it,” she writes in “Dear Shadows,” but I had a very clear sense that it was not the visible world that concerned her.

“I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude. // On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do. // I miss your heart, my heart” (“Dove, Interrupted”).

Reading Brock-Broido, I’m reminded of one of my university professors, who once told us in exasperation, “Stop writing about hearts and moons, it’s been done.” He went on. “No one cares.” 

Having spent my day with these poems (and reading Brock-Broido’s students’ testimonials upon her death) — it’s fortifying to see how much the heart is still written of, and cared for. It makes my heart glad. (Visit this site to see her read a poem at the National Book Awards.) I’ll share a poem with a format that will work in this venue, but it’s really a book that you should pick up and look into, for yourself.

Cave Painting of a Dun Horse 

He is stretching on the wall, appears to be in motion.
He cannot turn his head, but you can glean his eye

By candlelight, a catastrophe of ochre hope.

I know little else having shook loose from my own mane
All that would be true if I said it to be so.

White canes humble through the night.

In the years, most of what I made, I made up.

The etching of your dying is as cutting as it was
That many years ago, when I chose its acid touch for you.

There have been two wars.

I have read religiously, mostly texts which have red spines.

I had dreams that were inhumane to me.

The smaller the light to write to becomes, the more
I have to say to you.

After attending readings, I generally buy my book and slip away — but I so so wish I had stood in line and met Lucie in person and asked her to sign my book.

 

Jayne Marek’s In and Out of Rough Water

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Although Jayne Marek is a relative newcomer to the Pacific Northwest (transplanted from Indiana, where she taught at Franklin College), she is a fast learner. I imagine her striding about the landscape — trails, riversides, boggy acres — notebook, camera, and guidebook in hand — translating all of it into poems and photographs for an eager audience.

In addition to native flora and fauna, she has also made herself at home amid our regional poets. In this poem, she responds to William Stafford’s “Ask Me“:

 

 

 

To Ask Me 

–for William Stafford

I will listen to what he says
in the poem of water and winter,
the ice crust of his judgment.
Wet branches drag into the sweep
of drifts, skirting the oldest tree
in its heaviness of heart. What he meant
shifts all the land around me,
a cold blue wind.

But who can say that hate or love’s
what swings the ice-bound branches
overhead. Can I trust him? —
that secret-heart, that man
of miles of blank fields pressing snow-fences
as if to flatten them —
the truth’s what the black bird says

on its wire:
a path is itself and nowhere.
What our feet can grip,
we may not see. So move.

Jayne Marek, In and Out of Rough Water (Kelsay Books, 2017)

 

Tim McNulty’s Ascendance

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This afternoon I am Bellingham-bound, where I will be attending the 2018 Arbuthnot Honor Reading at Western Washington University, featuring Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ve spent the morning reading Tim McNulty’s Ascendance, a book which is so much about place that it could serve as a field guide. Look for yarrow, buckwheat, tall spindly ears of deer, pearly everlasting, Indian plum. Its five sections range from poems about his daughter (introducing her to the wild places has clearly been a great joy for the author); to poems inspired by paintings by northwest artist Morris Graves; poems about salmon and their rivers; poems depicting a season living in a mountain lookout. They are not all set in the Pacific Northwest, but they might all be said to share a northwest way of seeing, an appreciation of plantlife and animal life and the serious business of loving the planet.

In this poem, notice the almost haiku-like attention coupled with a metaphoric reach as large as oceans

Night, Sourdough Mountain Lookout

A late-summer sun
threads the needles of McMillan Spires
and disappears in a reef of coral cloud.

Winds roil the mountain trees,
batter the shutter props.

I light a candle with the coming dark.
Its reflection in the window glass
flickers over mountains and
shadowed valleys
seventeen miles north to Canada.

Not another light.

The lookout is a dim star
anchored to a rib of the planet
like a skiff to a shoal
in a wheeling sea of stars.

Night sky at full flood.

Wildly awake.

Tim McNulty, Ascendance (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2013)

Peggy Shumaker’s Toucan Nest: Poems of Costa Rica

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These poems need to be read aloud. Jane Hirshfield, in a cover blurb, calls Toucan Nest, “a book of burnished, lapidary attention.” And it is. Each bird and bat is polished like a gem. The poems are dense with bright nouns, and repeated sounds. The lines in almost all of the poems are short, and short stanzas, too, leave white space as if the are images leap from the environs like birds from foliage. People crop up, too, guiding, pointing, speaking. I kept stopping to look up names and words (Gallo Pinto, bromeliad, trogon). If a poet’s job is to pay close attention (and it is), Peggy Shumaker here fulfills that role beautifully.

Here is one of the poems that I marked to reread:

 

Rain at Trogon Lodge 

–Talamanca Mountain Highlands

Pura vida come purer,
bromeliads replenish
tiny lakes encrusted to their
calderas. Calla lilies
stiffen, sway.

Darting hummers, purple-
throated, green-winged,
whir feeder to fuchsia,
rafter to fig.
Drenched, the world

shimmers — pearls
suspend
along dark
soffits. Elastic
drops

shape-shift —
puddle, fishpond,
cloud breath.
Iguana’s drink, our
moist souls’ scrim.

Peggy Shumaker, Toucan Nest: Poems of Costa Rica (Red Hen Press, 2013)