New Issue of Calyx Journal
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Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water
WADE IN THE WATER, Tracy K. Smith. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2019, 96 pages, $16 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.
For my last poet in #nationalpoetrymonth, this book is too perfect. Here’s Graywolf Press’s description:
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s
contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection includes erasures of the Declaration of Independence and correspondence between slave owners, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.
—https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/wade-water
I lack words enough to describe this book. “Choral arrangement” helps (beginning with the gospel title). “Luminous” seems overused, but I knew when I found the audio version of Wade in the Water, that I would have to try to write about it. It captures both transcendence and terror, life itself. “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I will Tell You All About It,” one title promises us, and Smith delivers. I would love to know more about the process of writing these poems, or “creating” them, as some are erasures and others, collages of voices of slaves, and of Black Civil War soldiers and veterans. Smith brings it all to the page, and hearing her read this book aloud made my day.
Smith’s first book Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize; she served as U. S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019. She is a must-read.
This is the first poem in the book, far more conventional than poems later in the collection, but easier for me to reproduce for you. (Find more poems at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tracy-k-smith#tab-poems.)
Garden of Eden
What a profound longingI feel, just this very instant,
For the Garden of Eden
On Montague Street
Where I seldom shopped,
Usually only after therapy
Elbow sore at the crook
From a handbasket filled
To capacity. The glossy pastries!
Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!
Once, a bag of black beluga
Lentils spilt a trail behind me
While I labored to find
A tea they refused to carry.
It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was living
The same desolate luxury,
Each ashamed of the same things:
Innocence and privacy. I’d lug
Home the paper bags, doing
Bank-balance math and counting days.
I’d squint into it, or close my eyes
And let it slam me in the face—
The known sun setting
On the dawning century.
—Tracy K. Smith
I found numerous recordings on the web, and felt this one–her thoughts on the history and witness of Black poetry, and a tribute to Amanda Gorman–was the perfect one to share.
Brenda Miller, The Daughters of Elderly Women
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 formin 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 youknowing 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 dissipatesbefore 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
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 blackpebble lodged in a lateral nook;
the hollyhocks out the windowstretch 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, framerssetting window headers and door-
jambs—here no polar bears rummageat 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.