You found the heart; now find the agates. |
If
your life’s love wants roses and violets in February, he or she best not live
in Michigan. No, not true. Roses and violets can always be had if you know
where to go. Look to a florist shop or flip through greeting cards, if that’s
the way you want to go. Popular culture, traditional stuff -- what was it that
English prof called it? I forget. The comforting, the familiar, the lulling.
Lulling.
Lullaby. “The cradle will fall”? Before words have meaning, the baby is lulled
by rhythm and music. Sound. Movement.
This
morning I turned the pages of Poetry in Michigan, the beautiful new book from
New Issues Press, wondering if it might possibly contain the kind of love poem
associated with Valentine’s Day. I didn’t expect and didn’t find such a poem.
But I did find stunningly beautiful lines, both in the text and in the many
pages of full-page art. Robert Fanning’s “What Is Written on the Leaves” is
more a funeral elegy than a love poem, and yet its litany of farewells spoke,
to me, of the beauty of life and this world.
Of the season, let go. Of the ache to shape and make meaning,
let go. Of the hand in the dark, moss and worm, the awful gnaw.
Of the docked tongue, the root-clenched heart. Let go trunk mold,
branch rot. Of the green shoot that sprouts through your death,
being born, let go. Of quietude of a peace so deep,
of the changing light—of the euphonious chorus
of children, let go....
From
this quiet, dark, woodsy beginning the poem builds slowly, urging the reader to
let go of all manner of human responses and questions, as well as moods of
nature, each one specific and familiar, until the last line lifts off the page
and vanishes on the breeze, leaving calm in its wake.
In
the middle of “Aerial View of Warren, Michigan, by Jim Daniels, a poem that
compares the houses of his boyhood neighborhood to the little green look-alike
houses of the Monopoly game always in play then, the poet gives us this stanza,
one that made me smile in recognition:
We stood on stoops and called each other out to play.
We did not trust doorbells or any closed door.
Anyone with a piano or a dog of recognizable breed.
Teresa
Scollon appears in this anthology, I’m happy to say. “July Fourth,” a poem
recalling her father’s appearance in the parade.
We agreed it’d be good for the town to see
you. Stories had you half buried already,
and we were all so broken, panicked
but not saying so. And you relished the joke
of a sick man running for office, so Irish
in its blackness—nothing funnier than disaster.
So
before he died, there were laughs and smiles and “that mile and a half of
public sun.”
I
like Scollon’s identification of her father’s parade event as “so Irish,”
Daniels’s image of suburban Warren as a place where “a dog of recognizable breed
was suspect.” Because before we can “let go” of all these moments, these
memories, the feelings they hold, we must experience them, and do we ever fully
experience anything we don’t hold in memory? Alison Swan recalls a lifeboat in
the dunes, Jim Harrison a day of walking through Michigan woods, Diane Wakoski
“the rain forest of old kitchens.”
Susan
Blackwell Ramsey, in “Neruda in Kalamazoo,” imagines the poet Pablo Neruda in a Kalamazoo
coffee house, skeptical of poetry or love’s possibility in that town, until a trio of random
images changes the potential of the scene. Austin Hummell writes about ice,
under the deceptive title “Look at the Pretty Clouds,” in ways that bring ice
to the forefront of a reader’s attention. Not hard at this time of year, to
think of ice, but you think of it differently with this poem reverberating in
your skull.
“Is
the world too close or too far?” That’s a line in “Holding,” by Mary Jo Firth
Gillett, and doesn’t it capture one of poetry’s perennial questions? I am happy
to meet Judith Minty again, with “First Snow,” and have a visit with Jack
Driscoll over “Houdini.”
Then
there are the images, the works of art that grace full pages opposite many
pages of text. Painting and poetry, realistic and abstract, each one invites long exploration. David
Grath’s work (two in this volume) I know well, of course, and Ladislav Hanka is an old
friend of ours, but others are new to me. One artist whose work I am thrilled
to discover in this book is Karin Wagner Coron.
David Grath |
Ladislav Hanka |
Karin Wagner Coron |
And many more, of course.
My
subject heading this morning comes from a popular song, but I admit I use it
tongue-in-cheek here, realizing that not everyone’s idea of the perfect
Valentine gift would be something as “challenging” as a book of art and poetry. Many people, I know, are frightened by the very word ‘poetry’! (They’ve told me so.) I would do away with that fear, if I could, but we’re all different. So if your Valentine, the love of your
life, wants roses or a gold watch or a new snowblower or chainsaw instead
of poetry, then do, by all means, give your love something that will thrill his or her heart. I’m only
presenting an option. And remember, there are a lot of colorful pictures in
this book, too. Actually, it could as well have been called Art and Poetry in Michigan. That would have been my title.
True love takes many forms. It does not, however, take a holiday. It isn't afraid of a little snow, either.
Sarah on Tuesday morning |
2 comments:
Love this book. Happy Valentine's Day to you and your family and of course to Sarah too.
I love the look on Sarah's beautiful face. It says there is nowhere in the world she would rather be and she feels safe and secure, knowing she is loved.
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