Melissa Kwasny’s Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

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Who is Melissa Kwasny? How is it that I hadn’t known of her before this? How did she come to write this startling book?

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, the 2017 entry in the Pacific Northwest Poetry series, simply blows me away. It’s perhaps a tough sell to a general audience, but I’m going to try. (With one opening couplet that reads thus: “Faint. Uncombed. Awash in rain. / They share the kind of beauty shared by older women.” What on earth will this poem be about?) It was not the sort of book I normally set out to read in one day. These are poems that one needs to mull over, to live with. Ultimately, it’s a book I will keep on my shelf to reread at a slower pace. A book that I already know will reward rereading.

Here is one prose poem from a series of 6 titled “Another Letter to the Soul”:

4.

You are the sound of rain, if it weren’t falling but rising from below, a ground-nester, not a tree one, such as the bobolink or longspur, created below our feet, like the oil is. Rain in the ears and snowmelt rushing through the heart, a distant sound, as of the past retreating. Though loud, continuing its retreating presence. What can the flood teach me about you? I see frothing at the surface and watch myself pulled in, as if identity were an antithesis to gravity. Yet not knowing is part of you, whether I sink or swim, whether I abandon the body or stay and fight for it. When someone says, “you will know when the time comes,” does she mean the soul speaks? What part, then, indecision, net of doubts we might call debris, web of plastic tape roping off the danger? Mudbanks where the deer’s leg sinks in?

I’ve been fascinated by the soul, by the concept of the soul, since I was a kid. I won’t go into that right now, except to say that Kwasny’s book shows me that I am not alone in my obsessions. (And floods! “What can the flood teach me about you?”) Her poems make me want to open my notebook and write my own meditations, to ride them as far as they will take me, even if I end up falling into a mudbank. First, after all, there’s the soaring.

Improvisation on a Theme

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Okay, okay, I said I’d read a poetry book every day in April and report here. But the only book I read today (and that, rather obsessively) was my own manuscript of poems, which I told my editor I would send to him. Today.

It still isn’t where I want it to be, but I’m hoping that a good night’s sleep will help to get it to the finish line.

It’s after 10:00 (which means the date of the post will be tomorrow’s — grrr), and I have to get up early tomorrow to drive to Allyn, where my mother lives in care. So, to hold my place in April’s line-up of poetry books, here is an outtake from Bethany Reid’s Body My House.  It was originally a postcard poem and was published, with the postcard image, in First Class Literary Magazine.

Rainier

Her waitress shift began at six a.m.,
which meant setting out in darkness
on the river road to town.
Halfway there, the mountain
caught the sunlight,
breaking from the morning, bold as an egg
breaking onto the grill,
looming over barbed wire fences
and milk cows swaying, full-uddered, into barns.
Years later, sitting in the circle of light
under her desklamp,
she thinks of that mountain,
how it held a place for her,
like a bookmark,
between childhood’s locked diary
and this poem.

 

Linda Pastan’s Insomnia

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Just the title alone would be enough to make this book resonate with me. But it’s also by Linda Pastan, who wrote “An Early Afterlife,” and — so far as I’m concerned — could have retired after that and still stayed at the top of my list.

Instead, we have Insomnia (Norton, 2015). As Pastan grows older — she is 83  (“Why are these old, gnarled trees / so beautiful, while I am merely / old and gnarled?”) — her themes turn toward long marriage, illness, sleepness nights. She has always handled domestic subjects — like death — deftly, with grace and accuracy. Her eye is as sharp as ever.

Consider the Space Between Stars

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks

and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space

between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
these vanishing years, filled with light.

-Linda Pastan

Maurice Harmon’s When Love Is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems

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This morning I reread the poems in Love Is Not Enough by Irish academic and poet Maurice Harmon (given name pronounced “Morris”). The book was published in 2010 on the occasion of Harmon’s 80th birthday and includes selections from his earlier books, including The Last Regatta, and The Mischievous Boy. On my recent visit to Ireland I was privileged to meet Professor Harmon and his wife, Maura, and have tea with them in their Dublin home. Hearing him read (in his soft Irish brogue) a poem about his mother was one of the highlights of the trip. (You can hear him, yourself, by clicking on this link.)

The poems run the gamut from translations of medieval Irish lyrics, to long narratives about priests and randy poets and boys sent away to school. Many of the poems are persona poems, almost stories rather than poems. And then, a poem like “The Long Haul.” Although a horse appears to be speaking, it could just as easily be biographical, and for that matter, I find it nicely describes my own writing life. Well, who knows?


The Long Haul 

I’m here for the long haul, an old dray-horse
has done his rounds. They taught me to walk, taught
me to halt, snaffled spirit, bitted soul.

No more. I’ve taken a shine to unmarked ways,
forgotten paths, unapproved roads, lanes
I knew before the halter age, rampant

From lack of use, one went to the national school.
I roam about, see life in a frayed branch,
kick up heels, drink from the waters of reverie.

It looks like aimlessness but that’s the key.
In time the dunce in the corner misses nothing.
I’m sometimes asked, ‘how do you put in time?’

I shy away, refuse fences, escape
the stop-watch mind. I’ve set aside bridle days.
From where I lie it’s a clip-clop to eternity.

Click on this link, to hear him read his poem, “The Stunning Place.”