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Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

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POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM, Natalie Diaz. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2020, 105 pages, $16.00 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.

In these astonishing poems and prose pieces, Natalie Diaz spins herself out of river water and dust. Reading this book, all the way through, this morning, taught me that I am going to have to find more ways to say “Amazed.” It’s a gift, but a living one like a rooster or a baby—or a knife to your throat. It wakes you up and makes you look at things you didn’t want to see, things you’ve studiously avoided.

Diaz has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Postcolonial Love Poem. Here’s a sample of the buzz from a 2020 review in The Guardian:

Natalie Diaz’s second poetry collection – up for this year’s Forward prize – opens with its title poem, in which past and present blur in an eternal conflict. “The war never ended and somehow begins again,” she declares. Diaz, a US-based poet and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, identifies as queer, Mojave, Latinx, and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe. In the US, she is, as the minotaur in her poem “I, Minotaur” suggests, “citizen of what savages” her. To be savaged is to be brutalised by her nation, but also lurking beneath the verb is the savage, a slur for indigenous people. —Emily Peréz

Diaz is “a language activist” and dusts the English of her poems with Spanish and Mojave words. This book is a protest poem—see “The First Water Is the Body”—and it’s a celebration and a lament of place and family and identity, also sex and basketball. It blows my mind.

Here’s the title poem:

Postcolonial Love Poem

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.
We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.
There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.
Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,
blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold
the shape of any great hand—
Great hands is what she called mine.
The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
the war never ended and somehow begins again.

—Natalie Diaz

Diaz’s notes and epigraphs are an education in themselves, by the way. And one of the epigraphs in this book is from Hortense Spillers, someone I read in graduate school and when I was writing my dissertation on American (literary) illegitimacy:

“My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”

–Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Natalie Diaz is needed in just that essential and gut-wrenching way. She should be required reading.

You can read more by clicking her name at the top, or going to Academy of American Poets.

Amanda Moore, Requeening

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REQUEENING, Amanda Moore. Ecco, HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, 2021, 95 pages. $16.99, paper. https://www.harpercollins.com.

I feel as though I’ve just read an entire life, a fat biography of a life, and there’s no real possibility that I can absorb it. And yet. Amanda Moore’s beekeeping metaphor suggests I be patient and sit with it, wait for the honey to drip down.

The 2020 winner of The National Poetry Series, selected by Ocean Vuong, Requeening explores a range of women’s roles. Beekeeping with its queen is the metaphor binding the book together as the poems chronicle motherhood, the eventual disrupting flight of a daughter, the death of a parent. Teaching The Odyssey to high-schoolers. Cancer. Death. All housekeeping, finally. Always disequilibrium.

These are beautiful, alarming, observant and evocative poems: “a gyre of pleasure and labor within… / crumb of flower, spittle and weight, // apple tree, blueberry, / what they need but don’t want…” (from “The Worker”).

One of Moore’s achievements is the range of forms—some poems conventionally march down the left-hand margin; others are sprung across the page; and there are the haibun poems with their combination of prose paragraphs and haiku (“Backyard birds skim / juniper, blossoms, the feeder; / never alight”). It’s the sort of book you want to pick up in a bookstore and thumb through, just to experience its choreography. And then tuck it under your arm and carry it home so you can take it all in.

Here’s one poem from late in the book, after a mother’s death:

Everything Is a Sign Today

Feather in the grass, stippled and striped:
hawk, I think. And then a man
blocking the sidewalk, child on his back,
both of them pointing binoculars toward the treetop
where I know a great horned owl nests, though I’ve never seen it.
All these birds: creatures I might never have known
had I not spent my childhood filling her feeders, naming
each genus from our perch at her kitchen table.
A falcon swoops down beside me on the path
gripping some rodent in its talons, twisting the body to kill.
Like the time a heron a few feet from our picnic blanket
plucked a whole mouse from its burrow and swept away. She had been
delighted, said we, too, should grab something special
of our own that day. Turning toward home,
I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb:
an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved
those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same:
haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference
the season and time of day, which is to say
they are like this grief these months later:
all the same but for the light.

—Amanda Moore

You can read more at https://amandapmoore.com/requeening.

 

 

 

 

 

Danusha Laméris, Bonfire Opera

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BONFIRE OPERA, Danusha Laméris. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 13250, 2020, 84 pages, $17 paper. https://upittpress.org.

What on earth am I to say about this stunning collection of poems?

Both elegiac (“nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash / dissolves and is taken…”) and a celebration of the body’s pleasures (“To feel the way / it lifts up the octaves of sky”), Bonfire Opera took a fillet knife to my emotions, laying them wide open.

I’m not alone in my assessment of its paradoxes, and its beauty. On the back cover, Colleen J. McElroy describes the book as “a vibrant folk opera….a balance of music and imagery.” Dean Rader writes: “Everything is alive in these poems, even loss. Even death. In these finely crafted lyrics, worms, berries, skin, hawks, dirt, and desire exist and even thrive in a symbiotic relationship…”

Some of the poems are long, and begin the way a conversation or a story might (“It was late afternoon and we were standing / on the deck”; “In those days, there was a woman in our circle…”) But poem after poem stretches itself into a crescendo of sounds and images. In the title poem (the one beginning, “In those days”):

…a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear
as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still,
the way the congregation quiets when the priest
prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts
up into the rafters. I wanted to be that free
inside the body, the doors of pleasure
opening, one after the next, an arpeggio
climbing the ladder of sky.

from “Bonfire Opera”

I wish I could read the whole book aloud to you, over a dinner of persimmons and salmon. But for now, just one poem. I chose this, by the way, in part because it hurled me back in time about twenty years, but also because it so well explains why Laméris won the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Prize.

Egg

And here it goes, again, the body
hauling one out of the ovary
like coal from a mine,
lifting it up from the mother lode
by the frayed wires of late progesterone.
I can feel the familiar cramp
of effort it takes to summon
a lone ovum: my forty-odd year friend,
my little homunculus, my dwindling sack
of genetic gold. How many moons
have I carried you deep inside the secret stores?
You came into this world with me,
down the narrow birth canal, buried in the girl
until the first blood. And here we are, still
performing our same old reproductive ritual,
more formality than use. A mock battle
staged by aging warriors, turned allies.
Childless, I’ve called myself—
a son in the grave, and another seedling
gone to ash. But now I see
how far we’ve traveled together,
me and my specks of yolk,
sealed in the same skin,
spores caught in their pinules
beneath the fern’s curled fronds,
barnacles on the back of a whale,
nuggets of ore covered in silt.

–Danusha Laméris

Sometimes, as I read, I think about who I might pass the book along to. But this book is one I’m going to hold onto. Like her first book, The Moons of August, it demands savoring.

You can read more about the poet, and several poems, at her website, and at Poetry Foundation.

It’s National Poetry Month!

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Every April I challenge myself to read one poetry book per day—tackling all those books I’ve impulse-bought or been given by friends over the past year. Last year, I went all-out at the blog (see my post about Kathleen Flenniken for a great example), contacting many of the poets and asking questions about how their books were created. This year, I’m scaling down, but I still want to share with you what I’m reading, and at least a poem and some links for each poet. Rather than a review, you might think of these as “appreciations.”

And before I get started on Gregory Pardlo’s Digest, a couple house-keeping announcements for the poets looking for further NaPoWriMo inspiration:

At the blog POETRYisEVERYTHING, bookstore owner and poet Chris Jarmick is sharing a poetry prompt for every day in April.

At The Poetry Department, Judy I. Kleinberg posts poetry news daily—local, national, or international—and she has a calendar for April events: https://thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com/2022/03/31/get-out-the-calendar/

 

DIGEST, Gregory Pardlo. Four Way Books, POB 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 2014, 78 pages, www.fourwaybooks.com.

Here’s one you may have heard of, as not only have I blogged about this book before, but Digest was the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. On the back cover, Campbell McGrath beautifully captures some of my own thoughts about this complex and mind-blowing excursion into literature, philosophy, and the extraordinary domestic: “Gregory Pardlo’s engaged, intelligent poetry, with its exuberant range of cultural and historical reference, feel[s] a bit like stumbling out of the desert to encounter the Nile River. Smart and humane, Digest engages in lyricized textual analysis, playful philosophical exegesis, and satirical syllabi building.”

About that last—Pardlo includes a series of syllabi-like prose(ish) poems that delighted me. I thought of my days as an adjunct at the University of Washington, where each quarter we competed to come up with the most stunning (and increasingly obscure) paragraph describing our upcoming courses.

Ghosts in the Machine: Synergy and the Dialogic System

Self-effacing, the number zero stands austere, a window onto Nature’s
abhorrent force, a hyperborean rebuke to the tropic heat of being. We
might say zero is the perfection of affect, round as a pucker it dallies,
dispassionate, for a kiss. In this course, we will observe our stalwart
and lonely hero, zero, and its intercourse with the number one or,
what Nietzsche refers to as “Dionysiac rapture,” the “vision of mystical
Oneness” symbolizing the root assertion of self-surrender: yes. And
we will study how this primordial union begets the mystery of Zeno’s
arrow stitching the sky across a battlefield, or begets the way sweet
nothings from a random-dialing jailhouse phone might morbidly
prick the pulse. we will consider the connotative spark rattling like a
pinball in the void between two bumpers of denotation, overloading
the light bulb above our heads, or worse, animating anxieties strapped
to the gurney within. That one hand clapping, for example. For
example, the call is coming from inside the house.

The book begins with riffs on home and a lens that tilts both toward childhood and parenthood, and (I admit) those poems were my favorites. The publisher, too, highlights this aspect, ending its description with family:

From Epicurus to Sam Cook, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.

—from the publisher

But. It’s saying far too little about Digest to let you think the book smacks of domestic harmony. A long poem with  numbered sections digs deep into philosopher Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, evoking a deeply troubling intimacy. In another poem, “Copenhagen, 1991,” Pardlo writes, “As adversaries we made good / lovers, made heat where there was little / to hold…” I could go on, but instead, in closing, a few lines more from the poet himself:

from Four Improvisations on Ursa Corregidora

…Once upon a time means once and for always
and for wherever you are and now I’m singing blues
in a bar revealing as much skin as you should
be willing to reveal when you pouring your seed
into the electric element. We are given two names:
one to work like witness protection, and one to carry
mechanically to the grave.

Indeed!

For links to videos, interviews, and more, go to https://fourwaybooks.com/site/gregory-pardlo/.