Joshua Martin: Earth of Inedible Things

Earlier this year, the AWP conference came to town. I didn’t attend the conference itself, but I did get the chance to connect with old friends from far away and to sit in on some poetry readings—including a reading of Georgia-based (or Georgia-associated) writers emceed by Greg Emilio. It was a fine gathering overall, but one poet in particular caught my attention: Joshua Martin. He used a phrase, “a lego-hard truth,” in a poem about parenting, and it immediately struck me. Why? Because this is exactly what I strive for in a metaphor: It’s deceptively simple, and immediately recognizable—something everyone knows without knowing they know it. It’s “organic,” meaning it arises from the situation and locale and does not seem out of place. It is accurate and concise, conveying in just a few words a concept that would otherwise require lengthy explication.

Based on that, I dove into Martin’s debut collection, Earth of Inedible Things, which came out a few years back. The book title comes from the last line of the poem “Crabapples,” in which the titular apples become a metaphor, or rather an outlet, for the unnameable feelings that the young speaker feels regarding the impending death of a grandfather. So, it is partly a tribute to the grandfather, who plays a prominent role in the book. But I wonder whether there’s more at work. “Inedible things” is not a common phrase, and evokes alternatives such as “incredible things,” which would appropriately sum up the sense of wonder that is often at play in this book, and “indelible things,” which would describe certain memories that have stained and defined his life.

But let me take a step back. In reading this book, I couldn’t help but think about Helen Vendler’s  fruitful approach of viewing poets through the lens of “the given and the made,” identifying their particular circumstances or life events and examining how those given circumstances form the defining trope of their poetry. Martin’s “givens” are at least twofold. 

The first is the tragic death of his mother, evidently in a car accident, when the poet was still quite young. The mother herself rarely appears directly—perhaps he was too young to remember her very much—but her absence exerts a palpable influence on the poet’s dad, who was left trying to piece together his shattered world, raising his sons as an unexpectedly single parent in a time and place where childrearing is largely considered women’s work.

That death is a shadowy menace, liable to leap out when least expected. I was initially struck by how many poems end very far from where they began—till I realized they all end up at the same place. For example, in “Hamlet on the Shuttle,” the poet begins explaining Shakespeare to a bus driver but ends up remembering his father, contemplating existence after the death of his wife. A poem that begins with Hannibal’s devastating victory at Cannae similarly ends with his father dealing with his mother’s death. The same is true for “Hamster Country,” which starts with the father comforting his kids about the loss of a pet and ends with the death of the poet’s mother. Even a meditation on eggs ends with the ever-present tragedy: “my father / those mornings after the wreck / that broke the yolk of his life, / his wife a discarded shell.” Obsession is the ursprung of art (how many ballerina’s did Degas depict?), and great works often come from a simple inability to move on. This is no exception.

Martin’s second “given” is his upbringing in the rural West Virginia—especially a town called Nitro. I thought the name must surely be fictional, but I looked it up, and it is a real place, named after the ingredient in gun powder, which the town was founded to manufacture during WWI. To put that in perspective—imagine growing up in a town called Roundup or South Paraquat. Nitro, in Martin’s eyes, is like a high school football star, who went on to sell used cars and ended his days in a nursing home. His treatment of Nitro as a personage, rather than a mere place, springs straight from Richard Hugo (and BTW, The Triggering Town should be required reading for all aspiring poets).

The language he uses to describe the region is at times aloof, judgmental, sympathetic, and nostalgic. For example, “For the Razing of Nitro’s Last Old Buildings” describes “Nitro, WV, home / of black soot and opiates, where the old buildings spoke / an adverb-less language.” Another notes the “vats of dioxins / at the Dow Chemical Plant in Nitro, West Virginia.” In “Family Vacation,” his grandparents yearn “for the promise of a sun they didn’t feel / in Nitro, West Virginia.” In “Greetings Unanswered,” the poet recalls “that hospice in Nitro / where my grandfather died after a lifetime / of chemical plants.” 

Given Martin’s rural and Southern upbringing, it’s not surprising to find biblical references sprinkled throughout the book, though a pair of poems focused on the story of Isaac assume a deeper resonance, given his complicated relationship to his father: “How long did Abraham look / at his son’s flesh, smooth as a still river, before / deciding on an entry point?” Interestingly, these poems are apparently ekphrastic, inspired by works of Ruben and Rembrandt—which are probably not household names in Nitro.  

Stylistically, these poems can be described as post-neo-formalist—meaning they are not unruly free verse or performative poetry, but do not adhere to any established forms, though the lineation often gives the appearance of traditional form.He also shows an affinity—as much as a poet can muster—for those who do not work with words. I thought I could hear echoes of Philip Levine in certain poems, but in “Working Language” (such a wonderfully contradictory title!), the homage was clear: “I’ve read enough Levine / to understand the loneliness of a sprocket.” 

Getting back to that “lego-hard truth,” metaphor and simile are Martin’s principal strength as a poet. Some poems are rife with the word “like,” and yet it never stands out—because those similes are intuitively descriptive and engaging. I could choose any poem and find countless examples. Here’s one from “Taking His Keys Away,” about his grandfather: “the pedal pressed / like a coffin into the graveyard of the floorboard.” Again—unique, organic, succinctly descriptive.

There’s also—I don’t know if there’s a word for this—descriptions that can’t be taken literally but can only be taken literally. Prime example: “I’m a kid again / standing in a field I know is losing its myth.” The only way to understand that—which we immediately do—is by being that kid in the field. Language like this appears on every page.

Martin was handed tragedy and bleakness, and handed back beauty. He’s certainly not unique in that regard, but his particular “given” and “made” result in poetry that is mindful and heartful all at once. I can’t wait to see what he’ll give us next.

John Hennessy: Exit Garden State

I thought I knew pain. And I was not far wrong. But clearly I am not alone. I’ve recently been reading the latest collection by John Hennessy, Exit Garden State. I’ve written with admiration about some of his previous work. This latest collection shows another side of the poet, showcasing the full breadth of his talent, as he turns personal heartache into art.

Yes, that’s a poet’s stock in trade. But Hennessy’s take is neither wry nor self-effacing; it’s just plain honest, and that’s why it hits brutally hard. But let me start at the beginning—with the first poem in the book, which sets the tone for (and teaches you how to approach) all that follows:

Hang the shovel from a Calvary
of nails. Resist your own cross-examination.

Amazing how much can be crammed into two lines! I originally read “hang the shovel” in the sense of “hang it all,” as in “to Hell with it!” But I suspect we are to take the phrase literally, to hang the shovel from a hook on the garage wall. But no, not a hook, but a nail—and not a nail but a Calvary of nails. I can’t help imagine the countless statues I’ve seen of Jesus with a rarefied crown of thorns. As a result, “cross-examination” takes on added meaning: an examination of the holy cross, or an angry examination of the situation. At the very least, we understand that the following poems are written from the perspective of a poet with a harsh Catholic upbringing (is it superfluous to say “harsh?”). We soon learn, too, that this shovel is for gardening (as opposed to, say, grave-digging), in a domestic setting.

Which brings us back to the book’s title. “Garden State” can be construed as the stately garden of paradise—from which the only exit is a fall. But more terrestrially, perhaps, it refers to the poet’s relocation to the environs of Amherst, in New England, where Dickinson lived her quiet life. A far more bucolic setting than the seamy petro-pharma corridors of New Jersey. In fact, I was surprised to see that Hennessy can stand toe-to-toe with any Nature Poet. In just a few lines in “Middle School and Son,” he throws in watercress, milkweed, spikenard, beardgrass, dogbane, bishopweed—it’s like reading a book of medieval healing potions. “No Clock in the Forest” trips from bittersweet and woodbine to peonies, foxglove, crabgrass, morning glory, and Jack’s pulpit. He seems to know the names of living things as well as Adam. Which brings us to the last poem in the first section, “Leaving the Garden.” This meditation focuses most plainly on the poet’s painful divorce, which becomes the biblical fall from grace—from comfort, love, family, familiarity. Like Adam, he suddenly sees how naked, how vulnerable, he has been all along, “no artifice, / the constructs, contracts, whatever used to pass / for life, exposed.” The poem arguably conveys greater poignancy because it is a sonnet, a form associated with the first buds of love and desire.

The association between the natural and domestic worlds reaches its peak, for me, in “Domestic Retrograde.” The word literally means “a step backward,” once again implying a fall from an ideal (or at least farther progressed) state. The poem paints an idyllic domestic moment—parents in the kitchen, children at play—disturbed by the presence of a hummingbird inside the room, frantic to get out. Suddenly, the home, the marriage, is a prison, however comfortable, that someone needs desperately to leave. The poet manages to capture the bird in a dish towel while the wife opens the door, and “in one motion, he was / liberated.” It’s an important choice of word, because while you can always be free, you can only be liberated if you are not. But while the bird is seen as a “crucifix hologram,” it assumes the guise of Mars, the mercurial god of war. As such, this compassionate effort does not avail the poet, who concedes:

Such a devastating summation! At some point, though, the poet seems to have moved on, and found a new romantic interest. But moving on is complicated. A shared history is hard to exorcize, even if the memories are not all rosy. “What if every kiss she gives me replaces / one you didn’t?” he asks in “Some Future Tense.” And in “Twenty Questions,” he recounts receiving “a letter that begins, I don’t wish / I’d never met you,” a sentiment that hits like a gut punch in its lack of emotional investment—while at the same time, suggesting its opposite, thanks to that double negative. Another poem addresses someone in flattering terms (“A mind no snake / could ever swallow”), and as it is a sonnet, I assume the subject is the poet’s new love. In fact, the book ends on a poem that seems to address the same listener; the tone is tender, which is why the last line, “this note to you, / who are here in my head like a razor folded in its case,” does not convey a sense of menace or violence but rather decorum and domesticity. It suggests that after being dulled by depression, his mind is now sharp again. It also conveys a sense of being cleaned up, made new, a tabula rasa (in contrast the the “palimpsest” he was in a previous poem). I might even go so far as to say the dead parts have been cut out, allowing new growth.

I don’t want to give the impression that this book is all about paradise lost and found. A large chunk of it centers on his father (“good in a crisis’) and the significance of family, both nuclear and ancestral. With age, he has reached a different understanding of his father’s life and choices—and sees himself in a similar light, as both parent and child. Numerous poems are inspired by travel, most significantly through the Greece and Ireland. And the grit of New Jersey is still prevalent (there’s even an appearance or two of Freddy, the pedophile and sexual predator who figured prominently in Hennessy’s first book). Hennessy’ work clearly shows the wisdom and self-reflection of someone who has traveled widely, keenly observing every unfamiliar detail. If I have any gripe, it’s that sometimes the references are a bit too personal and specific. This is certainly not Confessional poetry, but the average reader will occasionally encounter references and inside jokes they have no real way of knowing. 

Hennessy gives us a fun easter egg as well: at the end of the lengthy roster of acknowledgments and thanks, he tacks on a list entitled “Soundtrack of Thanks,” listing his musical inspirations. Not surprisingly, it is a very eclectic list. 

On an unrelated note, I was saddened to learn that Sandra Gilbert has died. She was a remarkable poet and scholar—you can read my reflections on her work here.

Eric Nelson: Some Wonder

Wonderful surprise! I was looking through one of my bookshelves for a particular collection when I stumbled across a small book of poetry that I swear I had never seen before and had no recollection of buying. I opened it up and scanned a page or two and instantly saw why I bought it. The book, Some Wonder by Eric Nelson, is, well, wonderful! It’s engaging, amusing, thought-provoking, witty…

These are poems of shrewd and bemused observation. Consider these lines from “Fair Road”:

In the strip mall more stores

Have closed but one
Like Jesus
Is always coming soon.

How can you not love such wry wit? But of course it’s more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. In very few words, Nelson paints a picture of a corner of the world where (although he doesn’t explicitly say so) life is slower, opportunities scarcer. It’s not necessarily the South, but it kind of feels that way. The Southern landscape and mindset are often on display. Poems such as “Inside Georgia,” “Georgia Sunset,” and “The Guitars” mention Georgia directly, while many others couldn’t take place anywhere but the Atlantic south. Egrets, dogwoods, pecans, wisteria, frogs, hog-nosed snakes—all play a part as subject or backdrop to these poems. As do guns: “Gun on the Table,” “The Gun Show,” Women and Guns.” But what’s striking—and distressing—is that guns are not portrayed as a menace but as a routine commodity, like a loaf of bread. Nelson also has an affinity for dogs, though again, not your inner city junkyard dogs, but the companionable hounds that follow you around the yard, strangely intent on inhaling life’s least pleasant smells.

And then there’s chickens. Nelson has a soft spot for farmyard fowl. They feature in “Better Angels,” in which their simple, hardscrabble existence becomes a foil for the speaker’s unobtainable desires. In “I Love Chickens,” he playfully reflects on the virtues of these awkward birds, and in so doing presents a subtle commentary on human nature, needs, and priorities. The poem relies on anaphora, with each phrase completing the sentiment started in the title, “I Love Chickens”:

…Because they are flappable.

Because every night they return to their coop
And every morning they walk the plank into their day.

Because like us they brood, follow a pecking order, desire
A nest egg. Because even their shit is useful.

Nelson smoothly succeeds in what I often try to do: describe a subject in literal terms that can also be understood metaphorically. So yes, chickens literally walk along a plank to leave the coop, but for humans, “walking the plank” conjures images of pirates forcing their captives to topple overboard to their death. And the fact that they do it “every morning” like us suggests that every day when we leave the house and head to work, we are metaphorically trudging toward a kind of death. While we both may “brood,” the verb has vastly different connotations depending on the subject. Then there’s the unapologetic revelry in language. “Flappable?!?!” Well, if someone can be unflappable, it certainly follows that someone can be flappable—and who more so than chickens? Great poetry often points a lens at the absurd but grammatically valid quirks of our language.

There is a sort of deadpan comedy on display throughout the book. “Our Wars,” for example, starts out:

He was a nerd before there were nerds
But one thing you had to say for Mark—
The guy knew how to die.

The sentence is a bit shocking at first, but reading further, it becomes clear that it’s a game—young boys playing soldier, mimicking those overwrought scenes from World War II movies. Of course, we know from other poems that Nelson came of age in the Viet Nam era (and would later take part in the draft lottery), so a description of a kid pretending to get shot can’t help but suggest a real boy—probably still a teen—dying in a real war. 

An elegiac streak also runs through this book, in which that wry humor turns a bit more sardonic. Several poems seem to ruminate on the untimely death of a faculty colleague in the English/writing program where Nelson teaches. In “Visiting Writer,” the poet imagines looking up from his work

To see you standing at the lectern,
Introducing the visiting writer. All that time
None of us knew you were the one visiting.

Suddenly, the title takes on a new object and meaning. “In another year” seems to be about the same person. In it, Nelson observes:

In another year the building will be filled
with students who know you
as a scholarship fund

Ouch! That’s absolutely devastating in its matter-of-fact summary. It also uses end breaks to great effect (“load every rift with ore!”). It goes on to say 

Whenever they wanted explanation
You told them instead to observe

That could in fact serve as the motto of this book. It’s only natural to want reasons for the nonsensical aspects of life, but in the end, the world—no matter how predictable it can sometimes seem—is governed by random chance. True understanding is impossible—the best we can do is to observe and appreciate. Building on that, the random nature of the universe, the crazy improbability of any of it being here at all, engenders a profound sense of wonder. That’s emphasized in the title of the book, which in turn comes from the final line in “Twenty-Five O’Clock” (which is a bit more elliptical than most poems in the book—I think it refers to the “extra hour” we get from Daylight Saving each fall). The poem ends: “Some wonder what I mean. Some wonder is what.” 

Interestingly, I found that I kept misstating the title of the book as “Small Wonder,” as in the phrase meaning “it’s obvious, it’s understandable.” It would be an apt title, as the phrase could be interpreted in different ways—and that’s a hallmark of Nelson’s style. In fact, the book ends with a poem called “Small Wonders” (the plural allows only one meaning), which is essentially a series of haiku-like poems that accentuate the mandate to observe the world to derive a set of truths (explanation being impossible). Our hunger for meaning may ultimately go unsatisfied, but we can marvel in the small miracles of life (as a guidepost to the large miracle of Life). My favorite:

Dogs know what to do
With the dead—
Roll in them.

Yes, those dogs always have a lesson to teach, but like Zen masters, they enlighten without saying a word.

Do yourself a favor: track down this book and spend some time reveling in its wise perspective. As the poem “Feeders” suggests: “Where you reflect, you will feed / Your hunger for wonder.” These last eight-or-so years have insidiously replaced our sense of wonder with a sense of cynicism; but I believe, underneath it all, we do still hunger for wonder.

Gregory Emilio: Kitchen Apocrypha

Recently, I had the opportunity to give my first Zoom reading. It was an interesting experience. On the one hand, it was great to be able to look directly at the work I was reading, yet still appear to be looking at the audience. Also, the real-time discussion in the chat was downright rollicking, and something that really wouldn’t be feasible in a regular reading. On the other hand, even with the feedback, the event lacked that interpersonal element (and obviously, no book signings).

One of my fellow readers (and Able Muse author) was Gregory Emilio, whose new book, Kitchen Apocrypha, manages to combine two of my deepest passions: poetry and cooking. You might think that writing a book in which every poem pertains to cooking or eating would be limiting. In fact, food is such a fundamental aspect of our lives (and always has been), that it lends itself to commentary on a whole host of subjects: sex, love, art, war, language, religion, sickness, death, and more.

Viewing the world through the lens of food delivers some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase. Consider: “the moon proofing like a loaf of bread,” “the night melting like sautéed onions,” “the moon drifting over the earth like a chipped dinner plate.” And Emilio’s palette is broad: oysters, mushrooms, octopus, tamales, risotto, fennel, waffles—every morsel becomes literal food for thought. And poetry.

Of course, there’s plenty of bread and wine. A presumably Catholic upbringing informs many of these poems. Biblical references abound, with Jesus making numerous appearances—sometimes directly, as in “Jesus as a Jaded Lover,” sometime more obliquely, as in “Whenever You Eat This.” One of my favorites in this vein is “First Food,” which recasts Eve from the Garden of Eden as a randy teenager. She describes herself, with Adam,

You’ve only to look at the vast diversity of life to understand that sex is a communication (no pun intended) that predates human speech, and even among humans, it’s arguably the one universal language (Maybe that’s why Babel had to fall?). This version of Genesis needs no serpent; Eve simply “walked to a tree called / ‘No’ and plucked a soft-bellied bulb / of fruit, nude as the moon.” I love that imagery—and I love how the lofty “forbidden fruit” is pared down to a single, palpable utterance: “No.” In some examinations, the forbidden fruit represents the knowledge of good and evil; here, it’s exactly what it was for all of us: unchecked carnal hormone-fueled desire. The description of tasting that fruit also hits home:

As this passage suggests, “hunger” for Emilio is not merely the body signaling depletion, it is a visceral craving to ingest life itself, to be fully alive (by consuming what is dead).

Many poems draw upon Emilio’s career in food service—he was evidently a waiter, and perhaps a cook. It’s that perspective that allows him to look on DaVinci’s “Last Supper” and ponder what no one else has (as far as I know): the serving staff. The painting is largely about what is to come—and for most viewers, that means the betrayal, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Emilio, it’s the woman who’ll have to clean up the mess after everyone leaves, just as she does every night, regardless of whether Christ comes back with a satchel of eternity. And though the Bible is mum on the subject, I’d bet the disciples were not great tippers. (In fact, you have to wonder who paid for that dinner in the first place.)

I tend to be somewhat withdrawn from the poetry world; still, it’s slightly remarkable that Emilio and I have never met in person—judging by his poetry, we must’ve crossed paths, though not in real time. He has a poem dedicated to Chris Abani; he and I read together when brick-and-mortar bookstores were still a thing. There’s also a poem about B.H. Fairchild at a restaurant in Riverside—I once had lunch with him at a restaurant in Riverside. There are also references to San Luis Obispo, Southern California, not to mention Atlanta (though long after I spent any time there).

There is heartache in this book—allusions to a lover who abandoned the author, references to someone paralyzed in a tragic accident, divorced parents, bombings, anorexia—but overall, the tone is ebullient, rapturous. Food is a broad and universal topic, and Emilio manages to distill it all in a feast that delights every sense, like a perfect port-wine reduction. The book is clever, too, in its assembly. It starts with a poetic amuse bouche entitled “Rapture,” and ends with “Revelation,” which begins: “To begin with rapture and leave you in / a matter of seconds…” The Biblical references are totally on brand—but more importantly, what a wonderful Easter Egg for the reader!

As one of my favorite philosophers wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” You can take any of these approaches with Kitchen Apocrypha, which will leave you feeling both sated and hungry for more.

Austin Smith: Flyover Country

In my last missive, I noted that I picked up several books from The Strand. One of these is Flyover Country, by Austin Smith. I’ve been parsing through it over and again, with growing admiration each time.

The title of the book is a reference to Smith’s upbringing on a farm in the rural upper midwest. Many of the most distinctive poems are situated there, but their allure lies not only in the way he portrays the landscape but in how he conveys a sense of awe at the natural world, along with his touching and complicated (though never quite resolved) relationship with his father. These include poems such as “The Windbreak,” “Hired Hands,” “Water Witching,” and “The Vampire,” (this last an intriguing revisionist history of a childhood episode or memory). Nonetheless, Dorothy leaves Kansas at some point to become rather cosmopolitan, traipsing through Barcelona, Lourdes, Amsterdam, and Asheville.

Though distinctive, the poems in this book seemed remarkably referential, with styles or themes reminding me of other works. For example, the introductory poem, “Lena,” is a sort of epistolary narrative explaining how to reach a particular town—or perhaps, an imagined state or remembered past. It’s hard to read it without thinking of Frost’s “Directive.” Similarly, the title “Country Things” seems a direct nod to Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Many poems also eschew punctuation, and though they do not fall within the Deep Image or Surrealist mode, they nonetheless display the influence of Merwin. “White Lie” describes the poet’s father spreading hay on Christmas Eve, a ruse to fool the young children into believing that reindeer had stopped in the night; the sense of childlike wonder and the desire to believe (or let others believe) in miracles brought me back to Hardy’s “The Oxen.” Then of course, “Film of the Building of a Coffin Viewed in Reverse” seems to take a cue from Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.

Smith has an uncanny knack for metaphor and simile, often piling one atop another. What impresses is not simply the aptness of the comparison but the unexpectedness. He sees a dead tree and notes “the tambourines / of its dry leaves.” In another poem, he notices an old man’s hands “shaking with the loaded dice of age.” A living-statue street performer opens her eyelids “like the wings / of a housefly who’s flown into paint.” A psychological wound (PTSD?) is described, “drifting around inside his body, bouncing / under his skin like a man swimming under ice, / Desperate to find the place where he fell through.” The arc of metaphor reaches its apogee in “Break in the Weather,” which describes worms on the sidewalk after a rain without ever actually using the word “worm.” Instead, we get “hieroglyphics / scrawled pinkly on the walk,” “marks / of punctuation in some lost lexicon,” passers-by “mashing this exquisite language / into pink pulp.”

The book is divided into sections, though I was unable to determine the sorting criteria, other than to note that the middle section contains most of the political poems. In this section, Smith grapples with a problem common to all modern poets—how to be political without being polemical (OK, many American poets seem quite happy with the polemical, but I generally find such poems rather artless). He succeeds, I believe, by remaining oblique. Many were apparently written during or in response to the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, though they are more broadly relevant. “The Bombing of Hospitals,” casts a disparaging eye at indiscriminate bombing by suggesting a time when even nations at war could agree on certain humanitarian terms of engagement. The poem is even more timely right now, in light of Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas command centers in Palestine. There’s “Swatting Flies,” which is, I suspect, a reference to G. W. Bush’s single-minded intention to invade Iraq, because he was, according to Condi Rice, “tired of swatting at flies.” Then there’s “That Particular Village,” assembled from actual quotes from DefSec Rumsfeld about the unintentional destruction of an entire village. “The Witness Tree” (which bears some tonal similarities to Merwin’s “The Last One”) engages with the “enhanced interrogation” practices in the GWOT. “We Defy Augury” deals with more recent current events, and is an attempt to come to grips with the election of Trump in 2016. The title is a reference to Hamlet, but it is appropriate both because the Trump campaign was just so damned defiant and dismissive of conventional wisdom (and the rules of good taste) and did indeed prove many pollsters to be dead wrong.

This last poem brings me to something else I love about Smith’s poetry—his deft use of enjambement and line breaks. Here, the birds of augury would start

“The Only Tavern in Hyde, Wisconsin” begins:

In “Three Radios,” a man milking cows listens a new report, and hears:

In all these instances, note how the meaning of the last word in a line changes abruptly based on the first word of the next line. There are wonderful instances of this throughout the book.

Smith also has a capacious store of history, and introduces figures both famous and not, such as Claude Eatherly, who gave the all-clear for the bombing of Hiroshima; Rachel Carson, the groundbreaking environmentalist; and Chekhov and Nietzsche, who are perhaps formative influences in his work. There are endnotes, but I confess I had to do a bit of background reading to fully grasp the details.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the book is “The Spider,” which begins as a light-hearted (though dark-themed) musing on the loneliness of life from a spider’s perspective. The spider is delighted when something snags in its web, and rushes over “as if to help” before spinning it round in its silk cocoon until its cries are completely muffled. Then comes the fabulous conclusion, with the spider sighing, “Then I am lonely again, / A poet between poems.” I have to wonder if the entire poem was conceived as a metaphor for writing, or whether that ending was an unplanned invention. Genius either way.

There is a great deal to admire in this book. My only critique is that it is fairly long—there are nearly 60 poems in this collection. And while they all had something to recommend them—a great image, unusual metaphor, engaging language—there were some that left me scratching my head. I believe a few could have been removed to let the others shine all the brighter. A minor quibble, after all—I’m essentially saying Smith has given us too much of a good thing!

Deborah Pope: Take Nothing

While in New York recently, I visited the Strand Bookstore, which is akin to the hajj for bibliophiles—everyone should do it at least once in their life. It’s encouraging to see the venerable seller of new and used books has survived not only the global shift to online shopping but creeping gentrification as well (I remember when Union Square was a very dicey area).

I came home with a few treasures, both from poets I knew and poets who were new to me. One of those is Take Nothing, by Deborah Pope. It’s part of the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, which has been issuing a remarkably strong slate of books every year since its inception more than 20 years ago. Pope has three previous collections, which somehow never made it onto my radar—which is surprising, considering the immediate affinity I felt. 

I don’t know if she’d consider herself a Nature poet, but she’s at her best when she turns her keen powers of observation and metaphor upon the natural world. In “Encounter,” for example, she comes home to find a red-tailed hawk on a lawn chair, which “cocked the copper curve / of its head, sharpening / the profile of the black, sickle beak.” Its calm self-assurance and power leaves her, “there’s no other word for it— / raptured.” How could you not love that self-reflexive joy of finding the perfect word—one that both clearly defines the emotion and brings a clever pun as well?

One of my favorite pieces in the book, “Snapping Turtle,” tells of a similar encounter. She finds the turtle of the title in the middle of the road, and stops to coax it across before another car comes and runs it over. The image of a woman hunched over, wiggling a finger in front of a massive snapping turtle is fabulously absurd—but what’s even more absurd is that it actually seems to work. The turtle, though, is not moved by an understanding of her benign intentions, but from an instinctive violence, evident in “the concentrated menace of its advance.” There’s a hint of Bishop in these lines. I’m thinking most specifically of “The Fish,” which also portrays an ancient, prehuman sensibility, and a suspicion of violence behind every rainbow. 

Pope carries it further in “Currents,” which presents a great blue heron on a river bank. She watches as it takes “a delicate, stately step / on impossibly thin legs, / hinged like the ribs of a folding umbrella.” What a perfect simile! In some ways, her work is reminiscent of another of my favorites, Mary Oliver—but while Oliver more typically portrays a detached wonder and reflection in stillness, Pope more actively engages with her subjects.

I could go on about the force of Nature in her work, but let me jump to “At the Next Congregation for the Causes of Saints.” The final stanza is a floral compendium, with talk of purslane, mulleins, burdocks, teasels, cat-tails, fleabane, and Scotch broom. I’m sure these are not just names she pulled out of a hat, but flowers she genuinely recognizes by sight. I am reminded of yet another of my favorite writers, Isaac Babel, who recalls an old mentor pointing at all the trees and birds that he would see every day and ask what they were. To his chagrin, he did not know. The old man concludes with, “And you presume to write?… A man who does not live in nature as a bird or an animal lives in it will never write two worthwhile lines in all his life.”

I don’t know if Pope has read Babel, but I suspect she would agree with that sentiment. Perhaps that’s why she can give us such fabulous descriptive metaphors: a cluster of tadpoles “still a nova of apple seeds,” a rusted out bridge a “steel cat’s cradle” (I hope younger readers know what that is), a rat snake “black as a shredded tire.”

What i find great about Nature poets is when they consider people and society with the same sense of curiosity and wonder. That’s exactly what Pope does in the first section of the book, which focuses on childhood memories of a troubled family that is at times harmonious, at times unhappy in its own way. It’s clear she gets her affinity for the natural world from her father, who seemed far more at home alone in a fishing boat than driving a station wagon full of kids through town. Some of these poems have the tone of an adult trying to peel away the unreliable accretions of memory to get at the actual facts and understand them from a grown-up perspective, rather than just accept them from a child’s view. Others display a willful desire to do the opposite: “I refuse to remember / the details,” she writes. We learn of her father’s drinking, gambling, and fatal cancer, and her mother’s failed attempts to leave him, all of which remain confusing for an adult, incomprehensible for a child. And yet there seems to have been genuine love and affection in the family. Hence, the sense of poignancy and wistfulness.

I mentioned Pope’s penchant for finding the perfect word. One in particular will always stay with me: in “Too Close to See,” she concludes by describing “grief” as “unanswerable.” In all our vast language, I can think of no better word.

Many of the poems in this collection appear in journals that I often read, so it’s not surprising that I’m drawn her work—though all the more surprising that I have not encountered it before.

Michael McFee: Long Time to be Gone

As an undergrad, I sought out courses taught by visiting instructors whenever I could—they typically did not grade as harshly as the tenured faculty. That was partly my motivation for taking a poetry seminar with Michael McFee. I was not familiar with the name—he had only one book at the time—but he was on a temporary gig, visiting from North Carolina (a pedigree that made him right at home at Cornell, which listed Archie Ammons and Robert Morgan on the poetry roster). It turned out to be one of the most memorable and influential course I ever took.

McFee was an astute and generous reader (although our poetry probably did not merit such attentiveness). He challenged and inspired us, and instilled a bit of his poetic sensibility without eclipsing our own.

Since then, I’ve followed his work with consistent admiration. I’m happy to report that he recently released a new collection, A Long Time to Be Gone. If you’ve never read his work before, this is a great place to begin. And if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll find everything you love—magnified.

McFee has a distinctive voice, marked by a sense of compassionate bemusement at the human condition. He as a knack for noticing the gesture or word that reveals something we didn’t know we knew about ourselves. He approaches language like a curious scientist, seeking to take it apart and reverse engineer it. An offhand comment can set him off on a grand philosophic or philologic expedition.

Like many current poetry books, this one is arranged into thematic sections. The first is perhaps the most elegiac, with poems inspired by the recent or soon-to-be deceased—a group that includes the poet himself. The first poem, “Brother Ass,” sets the tone, with a meditation that likens his aging body to a stubborn mule that just keep going, a thing of the earth, bearing its burden, the poet’s soul and spirit (a more concrete version of Yeats, “fastened to a dying animal”). “I mortified my body for half a century / by simply ignoring it,” he writes, no doubt hearing the root for “death” in “mortified.” And in “In Memory of My Niece,” he looks out of “the last window you looked out of” to see a bird perched on a branch, its tail dipping every time it sings, and he imagines her ghost pressing it down, as though it were a lever on a toy—a wonderful image, which evokes both her childish wonder and the sound of her song, which survives her. So long lives this.

The second section focuses on the days of Covid lockdown. I suspect every poet has penned an obligatory Covid poem or two; these, I think, will outlast our memory of the pandemic itself. They display his typical sense of whimsy or bemusement, along with his penchant for dissecting language. But mostly, they focus on how the lockdown reduced us all to our purest human components, like an acid bath. Faced with something new and unknown, he looks at it through the lens of language—which renders it less threatening, more playful and approachable. “The Word,” for example, notes that “pandemic is framed by the word panic.” Of course it is—but it’s only obvious after he points it out. In “No,” he laments the ironic oxymoron of the ballpark “closed on Opening Day.” And in “Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean?” he sees his hands beneath the faucet as “two lovers appreciating each other, / their slippery ups and downs and ins and outs.” A wonderful, sensual image—but one that is undercut, because he notes that they are in fact not like lovers, but rather like forensic detectives, probing every crevice not for pleasure but for evidence of the unclean. The human urge for contact is internally curtailed by Big Brother or the morality police.

The final section mostly comprises portraits, after a fashion. Most intriguing is his focus, in several poems, on the autograph. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a discourse on the topic, though McFee shows it’s an intriguing concept. On the one hand, it exemplifies our desire to have a connection to fame, even if it isn’t our own. It suggest that we can learn a lot about ourselves by looking at how we idolize. And it begs the question of what distinguishes an autograph from simple graffiti? Is it the medium? The prestige of the writer? The value imposed by the receiver? Ultimately, of course, every poem is an autograph, the inimitable signature of the poet. 

I could dote on every poem in this collection, but let me wrap up with a section of “A Grudge,” in which his linguistic sensibilities are on full display. He considers the sound and feel of the word, and in just a few lines, give us “growling…grumble…aggrieved…grousing…trudging…ridges…grump…gruesome…sludge…judging…drudge…grunting.” A stanza of infinite echoes. If you’ve ever pondered the relationship between playfulness and mastery, this will certainly give you more food for thought.

As a title, A Long Time to Be Gone can be viewed as a modernization—or syncopation—of the Latin axiom, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Here is art that will endure.