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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Fri, 15 Sep 2006
Book of the Day: The Illuminations by Mary Kay Rummel
The Illuminations by Mary Kay Rummel is a book of travels, both spiritual and geographic. The poet makes a journey to trace her own spiritual and personal heritage, and meditates deeply on what she discovers. For instance, this poem:
Learning in Normandy
Avranches, France
In a small town in Normandy I visit an old monastery
with winding stone steps, glass cases of manuscripts
kept in damp dark. Then, I walk out
into light, to a square bursting with life.
It is first communion Sunday for girls posing
in long lace, for boys shining in white suits,
for mothers with camera smiles, fathers with
minds on the coming dinner and wine.
In a place where everything moves upward
or down to the flat tide bed, I listen to a language
I know little of, glimpse what I’ve lost, what
I never had. Their lives like mine, I read
their hungers, their guilts, their overdrafts.
Their Sundays don’t hurt. I know their happiness
the way sometimes in a museum the iconic eyes
of some saint look into mine and irony lifts
from my brain. What’s left is recognition.
I walk downhill with it,
able to name some of the parts but not the whole,
inside me, what I know.
I felt a strong connection to the longing to name "the whole,/inside me, what I know," and how strong the gulf between that desire and the reality can be. The illuminations, indeed.
Book of the Day: Snapshots of the Perishing World by Chad Prevost
The sense of wonder in Chad Prevost's Snapshots of the Perishing World is profound. Reading the poems in this collection, I felt deeply immersed in the world, in the best sense: Prevost constantly probes and explores a sense of connection to the larger world, so that our awareness is expanded and enriched.
This poem gives some flavor of Prevost's method:
Lyric of the Ever-Expanding
Universe
What you thought was a star
in the north sky is a whole galaxy.
What you thought was a folk tale
about walking on water & lying with lions
turns out to be truer
than all the sun-bleached bones of hard facts.
What you thought was a mouth
is really a bottomless well.
What you thought was loss
is really an orchard of cherries.
What you thought was a youthful version
of yourself turns out to be a shadow
shifting out of your eye’s corner.
What you thought was a snail’s slick trail
turns out to be a sidewalk’s veins,
branching off among the dandelions.
You thought the dandelions stood in place,
but come to find they’re dancing
across the wind like tumbleweeds,
wheeling without thought of gravity.
What you thought was gravity
is only your body’s leaden weight
pinning down your dandelion soul.
What you thought was your chest
is really an impenetrable forest,
& what you thought was a forest
is the ever-diminishing hiding place
of your crimes, & the place to free them
is at the bottom of your lungs,
where a whole universe billows even now
in the form of old loves.
What you thought was a one-time high
becomes a string of lights wrapped
around the temple of your body
till you’re one great ball of wire, incandescent,
blowing fuses like popcorn.
What you thought was a one-night stand
becomes a diaper trail sagging over the moon.
What you thought were whitecaps
shouldering to shore like the heads of the old
is really your lover’s voice
waving against the walls & settling
in the corners, reaching through
your cobwebbed heart, calling your name,
asking you to rise once more, to quit
pretending, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to end.
Prevost's poems wear their learning lightly, but they open up new depths of insight and feeling. Check them out.