Great issue from Poetry Mag this month. Maybe the best in years. Seems like every contributor hit their home run. Starts with Stuart Dybek’s “Scythe,” a lyric little poem about somebody finding a scythe in an old barn. “Daylight perforates the siding despite the battered armor of license plates.” What a great line. And a great visual, so easy to see, so easy to remember seeing its like. I’m thinking Christian Ponder loves secret sonnets, and this is another one, with its gnomic rhymes: decay with history; soil, skull, then trail, all in a row. Keeps it interesting. And Dybek has a way with a line. Here’s from his third poem in the issue, “Their Story” — “turn up the blue dial // under the kettle until darkness boils //with fables” (another near-rhyme, see?) “and mirrors defrost to the quick” I know a good line when I’m jealous of it, as I am of that last.
William Logan gives us “Christmas Trees,” a powerful, poignant poem of a time now long gone. “How should I now recall // the icy lace of the pane…or the skies of alcohol // poured over the saltbox town?” The subtle threat of that word, alcohol, only the most indirect hint of what’s happening in the boy’s life. “searching for that tall…Scotch pine // from the hundreds laid in line // like the dead at Guadalcanal.” Using the metaphor to give us the year, the situation, and then Logan delivers a gut blow of an ending, a poem the way poems are meant to be written.
Kim Addonizio usually serves up poems I like. This time it’s “Heraclitean,” and a bit more of a challenge: “In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet. // In goes the philosophy teacher…” Think how many less-honed poets would have started this poem off by unnecessarily setting the scene, something like: ‘I think of my school days….’ She is far more skillful. Just those two lines, we know where we are, what is the starting subject. “Everyone flopped into the creel // of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten.” Such an amusingly cruel line. “The heart softening faster than cereal // but then hardening to a relic // which turns into another line of depressed poetry…” hey what? And just like that we’re at the heart of it, it’s a poem about poetry! “…to recite to the next eager trainee // anxious to be more than lint.” Well, that hurts! And the ending, an oblique reference to an earlier image in the poem. Maybe not my favorite ending, but maybe I just haven’t sat with it enough, to really get the full understanding. And go back and consider the attention to her world that comes out with the softening cereaal. What a great metaphor to have found, que no? Gotta say thank you for that one.
Dean Young gives us a great, funny poem, “Peach Farm,” — or maybe I should say a poem with funny lines. “I’m thinking it’s time to go back // to the peach farm or rather, // the peach farm seems to be wanting me back…” “Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never // been on a peach farm…” There’s a delight when we know the poet is not portentously serious. “I’d like to say the most important fruits are within but that’s the very sort of bulls**t // one goes to the peach farm to avoid…” And an easy, welcoming, cynical sort of ending. Disclosure of my own, though: I may love this poem in part because my wife and I once lived in Connecticut, and we’d go pick blueberries and peaches at Bishop’s Orchard, so I have been on a peach farm, and it’s one of the best little memories of our marriage, picking those Sweet Belle of Georgia peaches, white peaches, best we either of us ever ate, then getting some smooth cheese and bread and going home and just having a’ afternoon of it. So Dean does have some living to go do yet! Oh, yeah.
I’ve gone way over my limit and haven’t mentioned W.S. Di Piero, who won the Ruth Lilly Award and has a pile of poems in this issue, very much worth reading. Claudia Emerson has some good work here. her “Early Elegy: Headmistress” is great. There are poems from the past for the 100 year anniversary… Ah, just go buy the issue!
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
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