Another Sharon Olds New Yorker poem this week, “Still Falling For Her,” and for me by far and away her best poem I’ve ever read. I’m pretty much stunned that the New Yorker accepted such a straight poem, a paean to the memory of the narrator’s mother, no irony, no arch language, no replacing this word with some random image to show off how impressive our vocab is, just a rockin’, straight, blow-you-out-the-water good poem. She starts with a beautiful image “The phlox in the jar is softening,” guaranteed to draw in the reader, subtle, beautifully chosen, easy to imagine (and phlox have such a wonderful scent, btw). “keeping its prettiness // in its old-fangled gentleness.” And that line about the blossom, while referencing her mother, also could be about the poem itself, and surely it is — she has chosen just such an old-fangled style of poem to honor her mother, who comes through so clearly. Such a detailing of character in a poem seems to me one of the most important tasks of poetry, and sorely neglected these days. Several lines of the poem almost seem to reference the poet herself as much as her mother: “anything // she needed to do to get the music // to its hearers intact as itself…” And the poem talks of mother and daughter orbiting; so many depths to this poem, such a rare gift to see that happen ever anymore these days. Go read it, people!
And after all that blathering, now I have to talk about poor Maureen N. McLane, who also had a poem in the mag this week, and I don’t want to undersell it. Didn’t blow me away as much, but “Ice People, Sun People” also brought me back to re-read it a few times. I like the subtle half rhymes, near rhymes, hidden rhymes in each stanza, and the rhyming couplet at the end. Something like a squeezed sonnet, we could say. “My shadowed shade // my intemperate glade my big fat thrum.” Definitely a poem to read aloud. The idea being our climate affects who we are as people. (Could be a riff on my poem, “Eddas,” about Northerners versus Southerners, published in Avocet last year… or not. ;-> ) Anyway, I like the theme, you can imagine. Brava to both poets!
A peace of poetry,
P M F Johnson