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Oh my word! Or their words.
Today, I started to read Floating Bridge Review.
Wow!
I haven’t gotten past the first poet, Allen Braden, and I admit that I’m not familiar with his work. Or, I wasn’t. But the poems here (with their parentheses) are filling me and filling me. I get the feeling that the goodness goes on. There is more to discover between these pages.
Highly recommended, and you can get it from Floating Bridge Press.
Tags: poetry pick
…while we soaked in grace from the blue
light of stained glass. We were a river of blessings.
Starting with “Holiness,” Furious Lullaby, by Oliver de la Paz, draws the reader immediately into the currents of God, the Devil, and a treasured string of mornings.
The poems in the book are presented within a structure of aubades, essays, and letters, giving us “Aubade with the Moon, Some Bones, and a Word,” “Penitence Essay,” and “My Dearest Apostasy.”
I first noticed and admired this structure because it provides such a solid framework—solid, providing a sort of comfort, and yet open, more like a lattice, with room in the interstices for exploration, experimentation. That, and it’s a book full of poems about morning.
Yet Mr. de la Paz does not flinch from language. He combines mystic images with more scientific, or more Latinate, terms without stumbling syntactically. Instead of seeming out of place, a verbal jolt, the words fit with precision, as though turning a key for the reader. Consider this from “Flutter”:
…Ash-mouthed and mischievous,
their wicked beaks full of hair. If we kept disintegrating
into the sound of wings, we would be shoeboxes of dust by morning.
Or the first stanza of “My Dearest Recklessness,”:
We’d be in danger of splitting our loves into tertiary sequences.
You’d get the bigger piece and I would go on,
housed in my difficult sack-of-a-commotion.
Or these lines from “Aubade with Constellations, Some Horses, and Snow”:
Their helices of in-breath tick,
whole owls of flame. The field turns
like naphthalene—skins and snow.
The aubades read like a series of poems to the beloved—sometimes a lover, sometimes perhaps an old friend or an aging parent. The poems contain the sadness or longing one may feel at dawn or even before then, when the Moon still reigns in the sky—and the images, palpable, unveil in layers a great tenderness, as in these lines from “Aubade with a Book and the Rattle from a String of Pearls”:
yet you would not speak about things such as age
and the body gestures that come to claim your mornings.
Neck-sure, arm-sure, I think about you and your book
coming to some agreement…some place of rest.
and later:
Each room carried us from clock to clock. Each tick
an earful about ourselves. God knows,
the way night moves its shoes from side to side
or how day wrestles syllables from us in our sleep.
Then, just when you think this is a quiet book, Mr. de la Paz throws in “What the Devil Said”:
Lo! A jigger of wine
fills itself to the brim.
Heat I give you and a fifth rib…
As I said, Mr. de la Paz does not flinch from language or from love, sorrow, or loss. He confronts them, embraces them, pierces them, as in “Fury”:
…Poetry makes us bastards.
My dead cousins…my wounded relations
sleep in phosphorescence. A canopy of stars
endless beyond the ginkgo, shine apocryphal
on language I dredge in safety, not fury.
I’ve read these poems several times, and they’ve opened up new windows, new doors—possibilities of language, image, of how a book can be made and how a living can live on the page.
Please allow me to introduce you to Roberta Spear. It’s possible that you have already met her work in the pages of Poetry and other publications or in the three volumes that she previously published. If you haven’t encountered Ms. Spear’s poetry before, A Sweetness Rising: New and Selected Poems offers an introduction, an invitation to her work.
In his introduction, Philip Levine mentions that “she never pushed her own work…If this meant she would publish less and sell fewer copies of those books she published, so be it.” Reading her books, including this new volume, I’m left wanting more.
In addition to the new work, A Sweetness Rising includes a few poems from Silks, Taking to Water, and A Pilgrim Among Us. The book begins with the new poems, and then the sections are arranged chronologically, so it’s possible to follow her work, conceivably, in the timeline that it was written. As a “new and selected” collection, it’s very selected, and the previous books contain many more poems.
Roberta Spear’s poems extend an invitation into a place and in the people who live in that place. They offer you a moment in a life, whether it’s the end of a day for a young girl and her father, as in “Paleta” or the mother and her son in “Dust,” on their way through the wind and dust to pick out a birthday cake.
Take these passages from “A Nest for Everyone”
the shoulders of workers crouched
between vines. They lower
their knives, the bronzed
leaves fall to the mud…
Or in “Quinceañera”:
two maracas stir up the wine,
the wafer, the sacred words
like spoons in an old metal pot.
Then she goes a step further, into the magical, as when she describes the aunts who have traveled
in gray shawls tatted by spiders,
And although the poems are grounded in the daily experience of her home, Spear reaches out—to Akhmatova in “In the Moon,” or to Stradivari in “The Fiddler’s Wife,” which continues
…at sunrise
he returned to his bed
remembering the delicate slits,
the dark veneer of a mouth
that never closes…
It’s luscious and restrained—the best kind of poetry to read with all of one’s senses. But, in addition to its open nature—its invitation—Ms. Spear’s work impresses with its generosity, its sense of humor grounded in empathy, as in “In Just One Day”:
Smack! The woman laughs for God
and all the others as she slaps
the wake with her fat, brown palm…
…She laughs here, but she’ll be the first
to kneel down on the cold slate steps…
Or in “Contraband,” a poem about her son purchasing cigars in Rome:
…He wants to press
his shoulders into the warmth of a stucco wall,
waiting in baseball cap and shades for
that moment when the girls on their lunchbreak
gather at the fountain…
I especially enjoy the poems about Italy, and in the introduction, Mr. Levine notes, “If she couldn’t live in the Italy she loved she was determined to find a way of bringing the country of her devotion to the Valley, and she did exactly that with her poetry.” In “Contraband,” in “Escaping Savonarola” or “Chestnuts for Verdi” she brings Italy into her poems—but it’s her love of place and empathy for the people who live there that bring all of her poems closer to the country where you want to stay.
That is the secret and the power of poetry—the possibility to transform, the invitation to experience the world you haven’t been to, a world that’s a pleasure to discover. I invite you to visit A Sweetness Rising.
Tags: poetry pick, Roberta Spear
Jenifer Browne Lawrence knows how to tell a story. In One Hundred Steps from Shore (Blue Begonia Press), she writes searing emotional poems with a depth of precision. It’s a difficult balance, but here the craft doesn’t call attention to itself, doesn’t distract from the language or the story. It’s just there.
Through her narrative poems, Ms. Lawrence speaks of family history—death and grief, innocence and the reflection that follows its loss. Her voice encompasses childhood and the depth that memory—years later—brings, without the two experiences fighting each other. She plumbs death, terror, guilt, and regret in the everyday way that people do, the way that they cope:
My sister dumps a puzzle on the table.
We don’t follow the usual rule
of not looking at the picture on the box.
Wheat bends toward the red siding of a farmhouse.
…
We work the puzzle, find the edges first.
We form the frame before we begin the middle.
Mom and Dad go in and out of the waiting room.
They bring paper bowls of chocolate pudding
and little wooden paddles.
Through childhood and living, Ms. Lawrence reminds us that grief is like the tide and returns, as in “Porcupine Child”:
how did I come to be
the ferryman burying over
and over the same stick in the water
taking babies across
the black river rubbing
their stains into my belly
While inviting the reader into worlds in Santa Cruz, California or Valdez, Alaska, the poems explore relationships between fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers, the conversations they start, the secrets they keep from each other.
Opening Day. Only he and my brother go,
and it is thirty years before
I learn what happened there—
In other poems, Ms. Lawrence speaks in a slower, more meditative tone, as in
“Keeping Our Heads Underwater”:
we are motionless
as the river we swim
under the glacier to see
what blue means the ice keeps
its secret we could burn
In all, One Hundred Steps from Shore offers readers a window into the pain of survival and the undeniable pleasure of good work.
