I just got a copy of Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside (City Lights), and I’m looking forward to diving in soon (I hope to talk about it in next week’s poetry post).
In the meantime, here’s a poem by another Irishman, Louis MacNeice, which has nothing to do with brown-eyed girls. “The British Museum Reading Room” is, I think, my favorite poem of his, and I hope you’ll tell me what you think in the comments!
Carolyn Kizer, who won the Pulitzer Prize nearly thirty years ago, and who was one of the most respected American poets, died last week. As is too often the case, I do not know her work as well as I ought to, but I’ll be taking the time this week to read some of her poems; perhaps you will too?
I commend to you her utterly charming poem “A Child’s Guide to Central Ohio” and the fiery yet funny “Pro Femina.” Her final collection of poems appeared in 2001–Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000.
If you have a favorite Carolyn Kizer poem, please tell me about it in the comments section!
I’ve been thinking about mindfulness lately, which is, I realize, sort of ridiculous; instead of thinking about mindfulness, I should just be mindful, right?
I do try, but then there’s always something in the back of my mind– a project for a client, how much Christmas gift-planning I have left (hey, I start early but my Decembers are very relaxed), books to read, reviews to write, wondering if my son will ever outgrow the vegetarian-except-for-bacon-phase, wondering what color I’d paint my front door if I owned a house with paintable front door (purple, but what shade?), how often I should be checking to see if Leonard Cohen is going on tour again, which houseplant I’ve brought closest to death this week, how much I wish Parks & Rec season 7 was on right now . . . and so on.
I have a few friends who practice meditation,and they seem calmer and better adjusted than I feel, but every time I think about getting a meditation app or reading a book about how to meditate, I’m distracted by something (often a small something who likes to wear three shirts at once, demands very specific, non-findable episodes of Super Why, and recently expressed a need for a “poem-book,” thereby bringing his mother to tears).
Which is all a long way of saying that my one small step toward meditation is reading poetry. Sometimes—most of the time—I can’t read a full collection, but one poem? I can do that.
So this week I’ve been reading and re-reading Neil Fischer’s [As if the moon could haul through you], which is gorgeous, and is about clearing the mind, even if it fills the reader’s with heady images (“the purl of south-bending river”—I swooned, almost).
Two of the best presents I’ve ever gotten myself are subscriptions: one to the New York Review of Books (this takedown of Jeff Koons makes my heart sing), and one to Poetry.
It just so happens that this month’s issue of Poetry includes poems by a couple of my favorite poets, one of whom is Henri Cole. I’m declaring his poem “Dandelions (II)” the poem of the week, partly because it’s excellent and partly because it wrestles with questions I’ve been thinking about quite a bit this week, thanks to an interesting article in The Atlantic and Katy Butler’s book Knocking on Heaven’s Door (review to come). From what do we derive value and pleasure in life, and how do we weigh those values and pleasures as we become old or sick? How can we best care for those who cannot care for themselves? How do we deal with endings?
On a related note, I just finished reading Louise Glück’s new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night. It’s stunning, and I highly recommend it.
Dear Readers,
As you know, I adore Leonard Cohen. Today happens to be the release date for his latest studio album, Popular Problems (which I have pre-ordered, of course), and Sunday was his eightieth birthday (which he shares with one of my dearest friends).
So the poem of the week is “Going Home,” and it also happens to be the lyrics to the song of the same name from Leonard Cohen’s last studio album, Old Ideas. [By the way, Leonard Cohen once remarked, regarding the simplicity of his album titles, that he’d like to call an album “Songs in English.” I did mention that I love him, right?]
It’s my favorite song on Old Ideas; it’s both personal and universal, self-deprecating and serious, and above all, thoughtful. That second verse? Gets me every time.
I find myself rushed this week, Dear Readers, so this post will not be as long as it ought to be given its subject: Wendell Berry.
Mr. Berry is a noted essayist, novelist, poet, and environmentalist; he is particularly concerned with the loss of small farms in America. He practices what he preaches, living and working on his own farm in Kentucky.
Entries is the first book of his that I’ve ever picked up; I wish I’d come across it sooner, because the poems in it are wonderful. They are human and humble, agile and grounded. Though I admired all the poems, and the poet’s fine sense of our relationship to nature, I particularly loved a poem called “The Wild Rose,” which is a tribute to his wife, and In Extremis, a series of poems about his father’s illness and death. If you’d like to get a sense of Mr. Berry’s style, the Poetry Foundation has links to quite a few poems on this page.
I highly recommend Entries; I’ll be on the lookout for more books by Wendell Berry. If you have a favorite book or poem, please let me know what it is!
Prelude to Bruise*, the first full-length collection by Saeed Jones, is unflinching and intimate, fierce and achingly vulnerable. It’s a remarkable collection, perhaps the most highly anticipated book of poems to appear this year, and it is not to be missed.
These poems in Prelude to Bruise are firmly grounded in the body, and in one body in particular. The collection traces, with some digressions, the life of “Boy,” who is young, black, queer, and growing up in the South. These poems are often autobiographical, both political and personal in their evocation of the lived experience they shape and are shaped by. They are mesmerizing and dramatic.
Mr. Jones’s skill and versatility are impressive. Here you’ll find poems of varying forms, meters, and lengths. In some poems, like “Prelude to Bruise,” which lends its title to the collection, Mr. Jones explores the emotive possibilities of just a few key words (black, back, body, burning, broken); in others, metaphors and imagery take center stage (one of my favorites lines is “The dress is an oil slick”).
Prelude to Bruise is divided into six sections, and while the autobiographically inclined poems make up a large portion of the collection, poems in which Mr. Jones enters other lives (and deaths) appear throughout. Here, in poems like “Daedalus, after Icarus,” “Jasper 1998,” and “Lower Ninth,” we find a poetic voice attuned to detail and perspective, alive with empathy.
Take, for example, “Isaac, after Mount Moriah,” which you can read here thanks to the fine people at Linebreak. The calm image of a boy so deeply asleep that rain pools “in the dips of his collarbone” is shattered when we realize, in the the next line, that the speaker is his father, Abraham, who was ready to kill Isaac on Mount Moriah. Seeing his son’s fear, even in sleep, Abraham wonders, “What kind of father does he make me this boy / I find tangled in the hair of willows, curled fetal / in the grove?” It both is and is not the right question to ask; we’re ask to hold in our minds both the image of the father giving his son a blanket without disturbing him and the image of the vulnerable boy (“curled fetal”) that father raised his hand against. It’s a complicated, engaging poem, gracefully rendered.
Mr. Jones writes beautifully and powerfully about specific experiences tied to universal concerns –life, death, danger, desire, family. Prelude to Bruise is highly recommended.
Saskia Hamilton’s Corridor* was one of this year’s more challenging reads for me. Ms. Hamilton’s poems carefully shaped and almost spare in style, but their content is so dense that I’d often read a poem three or four times before I felt I was beginning to understand it. This isn’t a criticism, necessarily; I read poetry in part because I like to be asked to use the mental flexibility and creativity at my disposal. Ms. Hamilton’s poems require quite a bit of both.
Corridor‘s poems are observant, almost painterly. Ms. Hamilton offers us carefully-described scenes in nature and in rooms, but the effect of her lines is to make us feel as if we’re definitely in a place, but not of it; we are passing through. This emphasis on transience applies not only to places, but also to objects and books (there’s a wonderful poem that refers to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost). Throughout the collection, I found the interplay of intimacy and dispassionate interest fascinating.
If you’d like to sample one of Ms. Hamilton’s poems, you can read “In the Corridor” here. Corridor is a collection that rewards the effort required to read it, and I’m pleased to recommend it.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.
On vacation earlier this month, Mr. O and I visited the well-appointed Island Books in Middletown, Rhode Island. One of the things I liked best about this little shop was its poetry selection, which included recommended titles handpicked by the bookstore’s staff. Thanks to their recommendation, I picked up Jane Hirshfield’s 2011 book Come, Thief, which I highly recommend.
In this collection, Ms. Hirshfield focuses on small scenes, both natural and domestic, as she reflects on attentiveness, change, and beauty; of special note are several exquisite poems about aging and the inevitable failures of body and mind.
In “The Promise,” which you can read here, the speaker wishes that things both small and beautiful (a cut flower, a spider, a leaf) and large and wondrous (the body, the earth itself) would not change or fade or leave, while acknowledging the inevitability of those kinds of losses. It’s a wistful but lovely poem. 
It’s August, which means the Queen Anne’s lace is out, which means it’s time for one of my favorite poems, William Carlos Williams’s sexy and gorgeous “Queen-Anne’s Lace.”
Bet you want a glass of iced tea now.
Rosemary and Reading Glasses 