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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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Mon, 01 Oct 2007
Book of the Day: Renewing the Vows by Peter Schmitt
I greatly enjoyed reading Peter Schmitt's Renewing the Vows because of its quiet, resonant depictions of everyday experience. Schmitt probes memories down to the smallest detail, and they unfold unexpected depths of insight and emotion.
Consider the book's title poem:
Renewing the Vows
My father, who will be dead in seven months,
and my mother are renewing their vows
in the nineteenth-century New England church
they married in, thirty-eight Octobers back.
The few of our small family are there,
my brother, my father's sister, her friend,
a couple of cousins. My mother, smiling
almost shyly it seems, has yet to take
her eyes off my father, who stands there trembling
a little, partly from the tumor, partly
from emotion which the tumor's location
has only exacerbated these days.
I would like for my father to return
my mother's gaze, but he is staring off
in another direction, his shoulders
perceptibly shaking, past the minister,
past the altar, as if he doesn't have to
look at my mother to know that she is there
and will be there. Even as he speaks his part
his eyes are somewhere else, some far corner,
and he is waiting there until, at last,
her hand reaches his for the final passage
of the ceremony, before the book
closes and there are no more words to repeat.
This poem recalls a poignant event, the renewing of Schmitt's parents' marriage vows, but also darkly foreshadows the death of his father. Fluidly moving through these emotional contrasts, "Renewing the Vows" achieves a distinctive power--as do the other poems in the book.