I promise I will get back to some picture book and middle-grade reviews in December - but this month I’ve been writing on my work-in-progress poetry collection, so I’ve got poetry on the brain (a bit more than usual) and wanted to share a few favorites from my studies:
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
I’ve been reading this book to study how it works, since I too am writing a bit of an elegy type of poetry collection. I like that this collection edges up close to the topic rather than hitting it head on—we move in and around and over the Event (death of her son), but there’s no straight up narrative (I tend toward a bit more narrative style than Mary). If you are not used to reading poetry, this may be a difficult book to jump in on—I think this book was best read straight through, cover to cover, quickly, then go back and parse it out. Example poem:
You Were You Are Elegy
By Mary Jo Bang
Fragile like a child is fragile.
Destined not to be forever.
Destined to become other
To mother. Here I am
Sitting on a chair, thinking
About you. Thinking
About how it was
To talk to you.
How sometimes it was wonderful
And sometimes it was awful.
How drugs when drugs were
Undid the good almost entirely
But not entirely
Because good could always be seen
Glimmering like lame glimmers
In the window of a shop
Called Beautiful
Things Never Last Forever.
I loved you. I love you. You were.
And you are. Life is experience.
It’s all so simple. Experience is
The chair we sit on.
The sitting. The thinking
Of you where you are a blank
To be filled
In by missing. I loved you.
I love you like I love
All beautiful things.
True beauty is truly seldom.
You were. You are
In May. May now is looking onto
The June that is coming up.
This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I’ve been singing,
Even when you’ve told me to quiet.
I haven’t been quiet.
I’ve been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I’m crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.
The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
Louise Gluck has the voice of a prophetess. She is grand, distant, a bit cold, pronouncing truth from atop a mountain. I intensely admire her sparse lines, repetitions with variations, way of twisting the poem right into your ribcage. I was particularly interested in how she uses the same title for different poems (“Matins” for example), and how those worked together in the collection. This book is accessible—if you are not used to reading poetry, you will still have no problem with this one, because of her frequent use of vernacular phrasing and simple language. If you are used to reading the bible, you’ll recognize the syntax. Example poem from this collection:
Matins
by Louise Gluck
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci BrimhallThis poetry is much more associative than I tend to write, and I wanted that to wear off on me a bit, so I spent some time with this book. It is about murder and being a new mom. For real! She wrote these poems in her son’s early years but also during a trial for the murder of a friend. I get the association actually—how to keep this little person safe in such a scary world? I typically have no patience for long prose poems, but they were my favorite poems in the collection (the forms were varied in this collection). I think that for the most part this is a fairly accessible book to someone new to poetry - sometimes she makes associative jumps but a reread or two and typically I’m tracking.
An example poem, and one of my favorites:
Lullaby at 102°
by Traci Brimhall
Let the moth muster some enthusiasm
for the streetlight. Let the tap run cold.
Let the laundry lie limp on the line. Let indigo
bruise the hillside. Let dust-stung and withered.
Let wind be the reason. Let July. Let clouds marshal
over the stars. Let the night be good.
Let the dreams be merciful and full of snow.
Let rain. Let rain. Let the lilies close if they can.
And let thunder arrive with rattles and drums
and aspens lashing the windows. Let lightning
find the tallest spear of grass. The fire that burns
the sheets casts such easy and welcoming light.