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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, 19 Feb 2010
NECESSARY TURNS by Liz Abrams-Morley
Liz Abrams-Morley's Necessary Turns is a strong collection that makes its way through a breadth of subjects. What unites the varied poems is their close attention to what is resonant, and Morley's unusual angle of vision.
Consider "In a Beginning":
In A Beginning
who named the beasts—
And didn’t Eve name the musical instruments?
And maybe constellations
giving woman the gift of dreaming
even in this beginning
I like to imagine.
The names of the lost—
(lost names float like confetti)
land in my alternate universe where
slaves in Virginia would be buried
under marble or granite quarried Up North,
Vermont, maybe, stones etched with dates
and taken south mile by slow mile. Instead,
I walk among trees I can’t name,
cast my shadow on graves marked
only by numbered wooden stakes, gray moss,
deer paw prints and a few crow droppings.
Moments like these, when cows low and the mist
hangs so close to the grass they chew,
I cry for language. Violin,
I imagine Eve said when the wind’s string
sang a slow concerto. Flute: the wren’s trill.
I stop at anonymous #18.
Isaiah, I begin, and here, Jacob.
This poem imagines an alternate place of memory, of history, inquiring into the idea of personal and collective beginnings: "I walk among trees I can't name."
BODIES ON EARTH by David Swerdlow
David Swerdlow's poems are quiet, spare, and contemplative. Swerdlow's lines leap across the page, making careful use of both visual and sonic rhythm to guide the reader's attention across the space of his thought.
Death is a frequent theme of the poems of Bodies on Earth, as "The Lake" exemplifies:
The Lake
Right-angled light, cold window,
small and terrible
decisions left on the pier—
Muted white pines
crowd the water like men
who believe
in a mysterious God.
Over the water
small waves blossom
over the dead.
The images, carefully mapped out over the short lines and white spaces, encourage a close consideration of the sense and feeling of death, of foreboding, in the world. The poem, quiet as it is, is resonant and powerful.
REVIEWING THE SKULL by Judy Rowe Michaels
The theme of death pervades Judy Rowe Michaels' Reviewing the Skull, but the book is not so much haunted by death as informed by it: the poems acknowledge mortality, look it right in the eye, and strive to find peace and power in the life that is.
"Climbing Eagle Crag" is one such example of Michaels at work:
Climbing Eagle Crag
for my parents
If I went alone to a grave,
took leave, year after year, with a single
flower–would loss grow clear
that way, distilled sharp as names
in stone? They chose ashes
flung in air. Each summer now, we four–
uneasy but together– climb for hours
along a brook, through hemlock,
over granite and blueberry, to find
the edge where each of us can feel
singly. Dread? Hurt?
Desire? Fear of saying nothing
or too much. Years ago
we learned the sharp, clear cry
that brings your own voice back to you
from the air. You had to be
shameless, high-pitched, sure
of getting a return. For just that moment
concentrated as rock,
surrounded but alone, I could
make distance speak.
Meditating on death, on memory, the speaker of this poem bridges the gap between the living and the dead: she "could/make distance speak." This is a powerful distillation, and characteristic of Michaels' work.