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.”

Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August

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It is National Poetry Month, and having gone through all of my books in March (and letting go of a great number of them), I thought I would read an entire poetry book, each day in April, and then tell you about it.

A few years ago, when AWP was in Seattle, I attended a presentation featuring readers from The Sun, and that is how Danusha Laméris hit my radar. As soon as I got home, I looked her up and ordered her book. The Moons of August, I learned, once it was in my hands, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. When I read the list of acknowledgments in the back (Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar), I knew that I was surely destined to find her.

Laméris writes poems that so delight me, poems I have read over and over again. A few of her poems overlap with my own themes (for instance, “Fictional Characters,” which begins, “Do they ever want to escape? / Climb out of the white pages / and enter our world?”), but more often poems that I simply wish to goodness I had written. I write her poems into my own notebook, and see if I can imitate them, determined to write something that will please me half as much.

The Moons of August is like a series of hallways and stairwells that take you deeper and deeper into a house. You turn a corner and find a picture of her late brother, or her lost infant. Sometimes, you find hieroglyphics or cave drawings on the walls. There’s the funny story about her mother measuring penises, that turns into a reflection about God counting the hairs on our heads. We see people walking ahead of us, catch only a glimpse of Jack Gilbert or Temple Grandin as they disappear into a basement or climb out a window. Humor and heartbreak and a wry, forgiving and encompassing compassion are threaded all the way through.

I was thinking of the difficulty of picking just one poem to share with you, and then, I reread this poem. In it, Laméris displays that wonderful Ted-Kooser-like ability to take an ordinary moment in a woman’s life and turn it into something extraordinary.

Cherries

The woman standing in the Whole Foods aisle
over the pyramid of fruit, neatly arranged
under glossy lights, watched me drop
a handful into a paper bag, said how do you do it?
I always have to check each one.
I looked down at the dark red fruit, each cherry
good in its own, particular way
the way breasts are good or birds or stars.
Doesn’t everything that shines carry its own shadow?
A scar across the surface, a worm buried in the sweet flesh.
Why not reach in, take whatever falls into your hand.

Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August (Autumn House Press 2014)