The current issue of The Missouri Review features three poets. Rose McLarney begins with “How History Would Have It” describing the break-up of a relationship using the over-arching distance of a discussion of history: “So let us / describe this evening in a constructive style.” It’s an interesting attempt to create distance as though to alleviate the pain. “It was gray / outside, cold, and the friend went away.” With her next poem, “Redemption,” she examines the intersection of bear and human: “A skinned bear looks like a human.” “That skinned body, / limbs spread…can I say now it looks…ready for an angel’s flight?” More discursive than incantatory, the poems more shift their view of things as they go along, rather than building to some big conclusion. Interesting.
James Davis May also keeps his distance in his poems. In “A Lasting Sickness” the narrator addresses a child who is sick — we gain the impression the child was the narrator many years ago: “Five nights into fever, you lie in bed / as your parents, urgent, move about you…” Such distance at the end allows him to ask of the child who he is to be, after all these others have cared for him. His next poem is “Portrait Of the Self as Skunk Cabbage” which is pretty fun. “Maybe it’s like those hard red rubbery spathes / that…create their own heat / and halo themselves / with soil wet / from the snow they melt.” Now there’s an ambitious line. I like how we’re pointed at the skunk cabbage with the concreteness of the image, but we’re still also getting a soul “haloing” itself. And it’s not all skunk cabbage, the self pops in: “Dumb from winter’s boredom / my brother and I…” Note how boredom there becomes dumb through the resonant sound. Very nice. And both of these poems end very skillfully.
Lastly, Claudia Emerson gives us “Infusion Suite,” a series of linked poems (or one poem of multiple sections) exploring again the identity of the self, this time in a hospital context: “She asks / again for me to verify name, date of birth…” With a brief glimpse of something else: “The trees outside…still full with summer, crows’ flight — more / like drunken tumbling…” These themes tug at each other through the next section: “she says / to the screen of her computer that my blood / numbers are good…” “Hour after hour we watch birds circle…” and the hairs start rising on the back of my neck. Then as we proceed through the suite, the attention turns outward, to others in the cancer ward: “his specialty the under- / carriage of a car after a wreck…” Such a subtle metaphor. Then a revisitation of the trees, and the last section devoted to “The old woman next to me does not speak / all day, not even to the young girl…” Wow. What a powerful working of images in and out. Easy to see why she won the Pulitzer. Easy to see she deserved it.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson