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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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Sat, 18 Jul 2009
SWEET SISTER MOON by Norbert Krapf
Norbert Krapf's Sweet Sister Moon is a rich celebration of the feminine spirit, manifested through a wide range of subjects. Krapf's carefully-crafted poems encompass history, emotion, and the natural world.
One of my favorite poems is "The Figure in the Landscape":
The Figure in the Landscape
I found my goddess
in the lay of the land
I love, in the curves
of her rolling hills,
the rise and spread
of trees in her woods,
in the tangle of
weeds and wild flowers
that grow lush
in her fallow fields,
in the way she
opens herself to rain
and accepts the snow
and swells and heaves
in the hot sun.
When I tongue
the names shagbark
hickory and white oak,
sycamore and sweet
gum, beech, black
cherry and walnut;
prairie grass, Queen
Anne's lace, mullein
and blackberries,
sassafras, pawpaw
persimmon, pecan
and tulip poplar;
Dutchman's breeches,
bloodroot, May apple,
and wild geranium;
and voice the names
of those who came
before me and mine,
Miami, Piankashaw,
Lenape, Shawnee
Wea and Potawatomi,
I feel my goddess
listen and respond
to my naming
and know she
welcomes me back
to the land I love.
Connecting the landscape, history, and the female spirit, "The Figure in the Landscape" is a resonant poem.
It's tempting to use grandiose language to describe this book: "Peggy Miller's Stone Being uses brief poems to ask grand questions: about the nature of being, and the being of nature." While that sounds hilautin', Miller's book merits such a description. I greatly admire how these brief, dense, solid poems open up into larger spaces.
Here's one example, "Fusion":
Fusion
If everything has substance,
our impression of empty space now
teeming with the swirl of dark matter,
then transitions lose any significant demarcation,
like layered dessert, green, then orange, then red,
but all jello,
and a human loses her separateness,
being only a lump of the same
as surrounds her
sweeping from here to the outer reaches.
Her being equal to her not being,
she is merely a moving flavor
borrowing fabric from time and wood and air,
her mind waving out through
the great cosmic blend.
The poem is aptly titled. Well done.
OUT OF SILENCE by Pamela Harrison
The family drama enacted in Pamela Harrison's Out of Silence is a powerful one. These poems, though restrained in their tone, have a depth and weight to them that belies their surface calm.
Here's one good example, the carefully sculpted "Aquamarine":
Aquamarine
That summer, I spent every waking hour
at a swimming pool sunk in the red dirt
east of town. Mother dropped me there.
I don’t know how she passed her days.
It was the year her picture changed.
Her smile was darkly lipsticked on,
her eyebrows painted to a point as though
she was caught in some permanent surprise.
Now she’s gone, what I recollect
is being in the water alone, bobbing
in the deep end, rising on a downward
stroke of arms, taking a breath and letting it out
all the way to the bottom. I did this for hours,
hearing the laughter and shouts of others,
blowing them away.
"The year her picture changed"--the overarching impression here is one of loneliness, for both the child and her mother. Every detail tells.