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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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Thu, 09 Aug 2007
Book of the Day: Eden in the Rearview Mirror by Susan Elbe
Susan Elbe's Eden in the Rearview Mirror is a dark book, taking a subversive look at the idea of Eden as paradise; there is no paradise, Elbe suggests.
This poem is emblematic of her technique:
At My Mother's Bedside
Bony hull and sunken wreckage, she sits
propped up by pillows , hands folded
like a splintered bow across her swollen stomach,
her thinned hair, skull cap of dune grass.
I stand next to her, my throat an ocean shell
filled up with sand, with everything
I don' t know how to say. This room, a seine
float, wavery with limit ation. Here, now,
life starts to blur, warps like fish under water.
Outside, voices of my playmates yap joy
in early autumn. I am eight years old, learning
that no matter how much life is left for me,
its exquisite green glass will always be distorted--
death, a dark meniscus of salty water leaching in.
Elbe's work is as far from sentimental as can be imagined. But the result is bracing, like a splash of cold water on a sleepy face.