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)

 

C. J. Prince’s Fox

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I am pleased to share with you this chapbook by a friend of mine, C. J. Prince. It was published (I want to say, produced, as it is a little piece of art), by Ravens’ Song Press in Bellingham. After my presentation on Emily Dickinson at the South Whatcom branch of the Skagit Co. Libraries in February, she handed me this book, autographed. It had slipped into a box with other papers and books, and only recently emerged. Clearly, it wanted to be read this month, while I was on this tangent.

Had I read the book by chance, without planning to blog about it, I kind of doubt I would have looked up Sobek. But now we know:

Sobek (also called Sebek, Sochet, Sobk, and Sobki), in Greek, Suchos (Σοῦχος) and from Latin Suchus, was an ancient Egyptian deity with a complex and fluid nature. He is associated with the Nile crocodile or the West African crocodile and is either represented in its form or as a human with a crocodile head.

And it seems almost a crime to include an entire poem here (the chapbook is very small), but it’s a short poem, and I have a feeling C. J. wouldn’t mind. Her poems are often political, and this one is no less so for being short. To learn more about C. J., visit her blog!

Sobek 

If Alligator brings you
a dead red rose,
know that things are amiss
in the waterways.
Be aware that Alligator
is protector
of flowing waters.
Turn off your faucet.
Send prayers.

C. J. Prince, Fox (Ravens’ Song Press, 2017)

Arthur Sze’s Compass Rose

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I have fallen into a pattern of getting my poetry book read in the evening, and posting as late as 10 or 11:00. It doesn’t make for a scintillating blogpost.

I have not, however, fallen into any sort of pattern with my apprehension and appeciation of the poems themselves. Every book offers surprises and delights. Every book has taught me something about my own poetry. I tend to tell stories in my poems, I like to tell stories, and just when I’m sure that this book is too different from what I do, from what I can understand or use, I find my mind expanding to include it — even to feeling the resonances with my own work.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in this last week of National Poetry Month, I’m beginning to drag my feet a bit. But the poems renew me.

So far as narrative versus that other element I keep butting up against this month — of not merely lyric but expressionistic poems — Arthur Sze has one foot in each camp. Stories do unfold here, and characters are clearly introduced. At the same time, images leap out and seize me by the imagination, and don’t let go.

After a New Moon 

Each evening you gaze in the southwest sky
as a crescent extends in argentine light.
When the moon was new, your mind was
desireless, but now both wax to the world.
While your neighbor’s field is cleared,
your corner plot is strewn with dessicated
sunflower stalks. You scrutinize the bare
apricot limbs that have never set fruit,
the wisteria that has never blossomed,
and wince, hearing how, at New Year’s,
teens bashed in a door and clubbed strangers.
Near a pond, someone kicks a dog out
of a pickup. Each second, a river edged
with ice shifts course. Last summer’s
exposed tractor tire is nearly buried
under silt. An owl lifts from a poplar,
while the moon, no, the human mind
moves from brightest bright to darkest dark.

–Arthur Sze, Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling

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Although I sometimes felt baffled by Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry in this book, I always felt dazzled by it. I am noticing a trend this month, one that first became clear to me when I was reading Alice Fulton‘s Barely Composed, and was heightened by following closely with Terrance Hayes. The poetry that is a bit…beyond…me is the poetry that is making me re-examine my own work, inspiring me to try (if not to leave narrative’s camp altogether) something new.

Yearling is published by Alice James Books, a press I have long admired. It begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, “This world is not Conclusion. / A Species stands beyond–” and juxtaposes bright facets of images with sounds that chime and jangle together to make music. “Bulbs of velvet gold wink in the insect // night like meteors sailing…” (“Man O’War”). That I had to reread and ponder and reread (again) — as I have with other poets playing so with language and lyric — was not the poet’s fault, but mine. They make me want to rise to them.

Here is just one poem for you to sample. I may have fallen down the rabbit hole in reading this entire collection of poems in one day, but — oh! — what a trip.

The Body as an Empty Cup

They bring things to you in smaller glasses
when they are stronger. Rogue hazelnut

ale, well-diluted soap, blush wine: these are not
stronger things so should come in buckets. Yes,

I see what you see — girl all appetite
riddled with holes. No, my throat has not drunk

down a barrel of Dawn. The West Coast sky
says I should’ve expected that from you.

So it comes down to forecasts and delays.
We used to sit, stare, and wait for what

was promised. When buckets of weaker
copies came instead, I recited cardamom, 

whiskey, blow beneath my breath. If I ever
come back to you, it will be in thimbles.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015)

The way the first line informs the last, gives you a clue to this poem’s interior. I had a sense that once I’d hit on its kernel of meaning, it came unlocked, one of those little puzzle boxes with a secret drawer. Do I fully understand it? I’m not sure. But I can see its strength.